


Shadow Work

by myrmidryad



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Canon Disabled Character, Childhood Trauma, Claustrophobia, Denial of Feelings, Eventual Happy Ending, Family Secrets, Fear, Haunting, M/M, Minor Character Death, Past Abuse, Porn with Feelings, Sharing a Bed, Smut, Supernatural Elements, aliens are still real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-15 00:02:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 192,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21244190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrmidryad/pseuds/myrmidryad
Summary: After his discharge from the Air Force, Alex Manes is working as a shade - a professional ghost hunter - when Michael Guerin tracks him down. Alex left Roswell thirteen years ago and never went back, but overnight Michael's family has vanished and the supernatural activity in Roswell has exploded, and he wants Alex's help.Featuring: ghosts, more ghosts, metaphorical ghosts, and a lot of sex without talking about feelings. Also missing family members, government conspiracies, and gratuitous worldbuilding.





	1. Tuesday August 24th 2021

**Author's Note:**

> This actually started as an alternative to my Cosmic Love Exchange gift for [tempest-nova](https://tempest-nova.tumblr.com/) and if you can believe it, it was meant to be short! SHORT!!!! And here we are [checks watch] three months later, and this is the monster I've made. Shoutout to [couldaughter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/couldaughter) for being appropriately aghast whenever I messaged them to cry about how much longer this behemoth was getting.
> 
> Things I listened to while writing include but are not limited to: the soundtracks for the movies Signs, Annihilation, and Arrival, and the following albums - Human Beings Let You Down by The Wind and the Wave, Stranger in the Alps by Phoebe Bridgers, Sleep Well Beast by The National, and Pageant Material by Kacey Musgraves. This Spotify playlist called [Figures in the Haze](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5H91Yj9M05z8oykyqbBuGT) was also on regular rotation.

When Alex thought about it, he figured he was probably doomed from the start. New Mexico was a weird fucking state, and Roswell was an even weirder town. Even the Air Force hadn’t straightened him out the way his dad had wanted – he wasn’t any less gay, and he wasn’t any less shadowed. 

At least he’d never had to go back to Roswell. He’d tried other regions when he’d been training to be a shade, but he worked best in the southwest, in the desert. It was annoying, but typical – people had a better feel for the supernatural in the environment they’d been raised in. He worked mainly in Arizona and New Mexico, sometimes dipping into west Texas, south Colorado and Utah, and southeast Nevada and California. But Roswell was marked as a big red no in his official file, and he had no plans on changing that before he retired.

So he was celebrating his thirtieth birthday in Las Cruces, in a grimy cowboy bar. He’d completed the forms for his latest completed job that morning, and was hoping he’d get another one through in the next two days, before he could get too bored. Strictly speaking, he was allowed to have a week off between each job, but he didn’t know any shade who actually did that. 

Most shades worked in pairs or trios, but Alex’s last partner had quit last year, and he hadn’t pushed for a replacement. There were never enough of them to go around, so unless he kicked up a fuss, the agency wasn’t going to hurry to pair him up with someone new, not when he could work solo. It wasn’t lonely. Bill had been a dick anyway, despite swearing up and down when they’d started that Alex’s sexuality didn’t bother him.

Alex was in no hurry to buddy up with another guy who would get all weird about sharing a room, and statistically there was almost no chance he’d be paired up with a woman.

So he was drinking alone, at (he checked his watch) half ten on a Tuesday night. He almost hadn’t bothered, but for some reason he’d wanted to mark the date somehow, even if just for himself. Thirty years old, out of the military, safely away from his dad’s influence. Two years into a job with a serving average of three. Those shades who made it past the three year mark tended to either develop substance abuse problems or make the job into their personal crusade. Most of them died in the line of duty.

They’d liked that he had a military background. Not being afraid of death was sort of a prerequisite of being a shade, but there was a difference between not being afraid to die and intentionally putting yourself in its path week after week. It messed people up.

So far though, Alex felt like he was doing okay. It was traumatic in a different way to war, but he was handling it. He filled in the psych evaluation form after each job honestly enough, and even though haunts were a different strain of horror from the human kind, Alex preferred them. He had a technique now; he had a process and a style to his approach, and his sensitivity was strong.

He took another gulp of his beer and considered ordering another. There didn’t seem to be much point, but the idea of going back to his motel room and trying to sleep was off-putting enough that he revolted from it. 

Maybe a different bar though. Hell, maybe a club.

He dismissed the idea immediately with a quiet snort, tipping his beer bottle back against his lips again. Las Cruces was the second largest city in New Mexico, but he was pretty sure it didn’t have any gay bars. Another downside of working in the southwest, along with the dust and the macho bullshit so many people put on.

As if on cue, a guy came up to the bar next to him and put a black cowboy hat down between them, settling into the stool with a quiet grunt. Alex didn’t roll his eyes or sigh, but he did finish his beer. There was another bar he knew a couple of blocks over that hadn’t been loud the last time he’d been in. He preferred quieter places these days.

“Getcha another?” the guy next to him asked before he could stand up, and Alex looked at him, mouth open to refuse – 

And froze.

Michael Guerin didn’t smile at him, and didn’t look surprised to see him at all. Alex might not have been sure he was definitely Michael Guerin if it hadn’t been for the way the man was looking at him, smiling without actually smiling, familiar in a way that said he definitely recognised Alex. The last time Alex had seen him was a few weeks after their high school graduation, his arm in a sling and his hand wrapped in bandages. His thoughts stuttered, his mouth still open but his words gone.

Michael looked…

What was he doing here?

He looked older, he had stubble – 

Did he want something? How had he found him?

His curls were still…and his lips, his eyes…

What – 

Michael’s mouth curved up in one corner in a small smirk, and terrifying desire punched right through Alex’s stomach at the sight. He snapped his mouth closed and swallowed, trying to compose himself in a second flat as though he hadn’t just been jerked thirteen years back in time. “Guerin?”

Michael’s smirk spread to the other side of his mouth and softened a little. “Alex.” He nodded at Alex’s empty bottle. “Want another?”

Alex looked down too, then back at him. Instinctive questions crowded his mouth, but he managed to hold them back. Michael Guerin was here in the same bar as him in Las Cruces. His dad was miles away in Roswell. It was his birthday. For some reason his mind stuck on that, and he swallowed again. “Sure.”

Michael’s smile grew, and he looked away to get the attention of one of the bartenders. Alex squeezed the bottle in his hand to let out some of his tension, trying his best not to freak out. He glanced around, running through his usual checks.

Main exit to the left, fire exit by the bathrooms on his right. Kitchen behind the bar. Approximately thirty patrons, spread between booths, tables, and the bar itself. Music, chatter. Clear line of sight to all exits. No unusual sights, sounds, or smells. 

Michael asked the bartender for two beers, and Alex watched his mouth move, the crease at the corner of his mouth deepening as he smiled. His jawline was…

Fuck. 

Alex made himself let go of his empty bottle and pushed it away, collecting himself enough to nod in thanks when the bartender took it and replaced it with a full one.

“So,” Michael drawled, and Alex tried very hard to compress over a decade’s worth of pent-up guilt and desire into something small enough to ignore. “You’re a shade, huh? What’s that like?”

Alex turned towards him properly and gave him a long once-over. Michael looked like a leaner, meaner version of the boy Alex had fallen so hard for back in high school. He was wearing black jeans, black boots, and a plaid button-down under a black jacket. Everything looked scuffed and worn, except the huge belt buckle he’d tucked his shirt behind, like he wanted to emphasise it. Alex just glanced over it at first, then noticed horns and looked again. 

Then looked at Michael’s hat. It was upside down on the bar, and he could see something tucked into the inside, a charm of some kind. He reached out, and when Michael didn’t stop him, he picked the hat up and turned it over in his hands. There was a bump in the hat band, and when Alex ran his fingers along it, he knew what it was before he even pulled out the leaf of sagebrush. The charm inside, when he looked, was a paper packet stamped with a protection sigil. Homemade, but sturdy. He couldn’t be sure without opening it, but he was pretty sure from the tingle in his fingertips when he touched it that it contained chilli seeds and cactus needles at the very least.

“Why don’t you tell me?” he asked, putting the hat back down on the bar and giving Michael a much cooler look.

Michael’s smile just grew, crooked and pleased. “Not too bad. How’s it treating you?”

“Well enough.” Alex tapped his fingers against his beer bottle, condensation cold against his fingertips. “Are you here on a job?”

“Sorta. Actually.” Michael pressed his lips together, then seemed to come to a decision. “I was looking for you.”

“Why?” Alex shoved down the flickering of disbelieving hope that sparked at Michael’s words. He couldn’t be here to rekindle their disastrous high school…thing. Alex couldn’t think of it as a romance; he could barely think about it at all. He couldn’t even force himself to look properly at Michael’s left hand.

Michael’s expression sobered, and he took a quick pull of his beer. Alex tried not to watch the way his throat moved, but he was only human. “I need help,” Michael said slowly, not meeting his eyes as he put his bottle back on the bar, holding onto the neck with his thumb and two good fingers. The other two – Alex glanced, just acquainting himself with the shape of the damage – were held straight out. The knuckles were…the knuckles…

“With what?” he asked, keeping his voice impassive and mild.

Michael exhaled heavily. “Max and Isobel are missing.”

“Max and Isobel…Evans?” Alex frowned. “Your friends?”

“Yeah.” Michael kept his eyes down, and didn’t elaborate.

Alex scoffed, not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that Michael had sought him out for something completely unrelated to their previous…whatever it had been. “You’re gonna have to give me more than that, Guerin.”

“It’s a long story.”

“You just bought us drinks.” Alex lifted his bottle. “Start talking.”

Michael looked over his shoulder and got up, grabbing his hat with his free hand. “C’mon.”

Alex followed him to an empty booth and slid in opposite him with eyebrows raised. “Is it a secret story? Because you know we’re still in a public place, right?”

“Figured we could get to the super secret stuff later,” Michael said. “If you’re still interested by then. Thought we could maybe start a little lighter, y’know? It’s been a long time.” He gave Alex a cautious look, a quick up-and-down that reminded him to keep his guard up, his mask on. “How’ve you been?”

“You want to catch up?” Alex raised his eyebrows, and Michael shrugged, lifting his bottle to take another gulp. “You first then.”

“It’s pretty boring,” Michael said, shrugging again. “I stayed in Roswell. You know how much happens there.”

“How’d you get into this line of work then?” He flicked his eyes up and down what he could see of Michael above the table. “You certainly look the part of cowboy shade.” And wasn’t that a trip? You couldn’t spit in the south without hitting a guy swaggering about in a cowboy hat, but Michael made it look good. It was a million miles from the shabby grunge aesthetic he’d rocked in high school, but Alex realised when Michael looked right back at him that he’d changed too. Was Michael looking at him and wondering what had happened to the eyeliner and the nose ring? Did he like what he saw, or was he disappointed?

Michael’s lips twitched, giving nothing away. “Figured I had a knack for it, and it pays better’n working on a ranch or in a junkyard.”

Alex frowned. “That’s what you do?”

“Well, not right now.”

“But…” Alex shook his head. “I thought you’d be long gone by now.” He’d never crowed about his results, but Alex knew Michael had been smart in school. Liz had always been complaining about it, and it wasn’t like Michael could hide being in so many AP classes.

“Yeah, well. Sometimes shit just doesn’t work out. Heard you got outta the Air Force a couple years ago,” he added, transparently turning the focus back to Alex. “Decorated war vet, huh? Your dad must be proud.”

Gauntlet, thrown. 

Alex shook his head and looked down at his beer. “Not so much. Everything I’ve done, one of my brothers got there first. And they managed to keep all their limbs.”

Michael blinked, but didn’t look shocked. Confirming a rumour, rather than hearing it as news. “Right or left?”

“Right.”

“How’s that work with driving?” Michael asked. “You got pedals on the left?”

“No. I’m just used to driving with a prosthesis now.”

“Cool.” A long pause, during which Alex wondered painfully whether this was really going to be it. Not that he’d let himself think about Michael much in the intervening years – less and less often, in fact, the more time went by, but when he did think about him it was with all the intensity of his feelings at seventeen. Michael had changed his whole life, and Alex had compared every man he’d ever been with to him, and found them wanting. It was ridiculous. They’d come together and been brutally separated in the space of less than twenty-four hours, but the impact Michael had made on him had lasted for over a decade. “How’d you get into it then?” Michael asked, tipping his bottle towards him. “Being a shade?”

Alex shrugged. “Always had the sensitivity. They like combat vets, and they like that they can send a half-Native guy to any reservation jobs in the area. Benefits are pretty good too, even if the pay could be better.” He licked his lips, and decided to try being a little more forthcoming, just to see if Michael would give him more in return. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, after I was discharged. I was kinda at loose ends.”

“You didn’t wanna stay in?”

Alex shook his head, looking down. “Didn’t really plan on staying as long as I did anyway.”

“So why did you?” Michael sounded almost combative, and Alex gave him a sharp look.

“What’s it to you?”

Michael hesitated, and he was the one to look away this time. “Just wondered, is all. Thought you might come back some time on leave, but you never did.”

“I didn’t think you’d be there.”

“That why you didn’t come back?” Michael’s gaze was hot when it met Alex’s, and Alex couldn’t decide whether he was relieved or scared by it. Their attraction was still mutual, that much was clear. But the way things had ended was hanging over them like a ghost.

Alex couldn’t think of a single thing to say, for once. He looked down at his beer again, digging his thumbnail under the edge of the wet label and pushing it back against the glass, the glue a grey smear underneath as it tore. He’d avoided Michael for the last summer he’d spent in Roswell, terrified of drawing any more attention to him than he already had. The last time they’d seen each other, he was pretty sure he’d told Michael to stay away from him for his own good.

“Hey.” Something nudged the inside of his good foot, and Alex went very still before looking at Michael, who had leaned forward across the table a little. “It’s fine, I’m not like…I didn’t expect you to.”

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Alex admitted. “I didn’t think you’d ever want to see me.”

“I always wanted to see you.” Michael shifted like he hadn’t meant to say that, and gestured to him. “You’ve been a shade since you got out then? How long till you hit the three year mark?”

“Another thirteen months.” Alex hated how relieved he was to talk about something other than their shared past. “You?”

“Oh, I’ve been doing this on and off for about six now.”

“Six _years?_”

“Mmhm.”

Alex’s mind whirred, and stuck on _on and off_. And stuck again on how Michael hadn’t mentioned college, or training at all. “You’re illegal,” he realised. “Aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged.” Michael’s smirk was all challenge. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t report me.”

If he’d still been in the Air Force, he might have reacted differently. But being a shade was very different to being an airman, and Alex had gotten used to working in the margins of society, and working with people who couldn’t always necessarily make ends meet in the way the law demanded. A lot of people bought dodgy items on the promise of their healing properties, or tried to bring themselves luck with a spell and ended up ruining their lives. And no one who called a shade in to deal with a haunting or a possession was having a good time.

“What’re your rates?” he asked instead, and didn’t miss the way Michael relaxed a fraction.

“Cheaper than yours. Not everyone can afford a shade, y’know? And I don’t limit myself to taking cash.”

“No?” Alex’s lips twitched. “I heard you guys barter for your services. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever accepted as payment?”

Michael grinned. “Damn, I wish you’d said offered. Weirdest thing I’ve accepted…probably tickets to the roller derby championship playoffs in Utah, a few years back.”

“The what?”

“Roller derby. Women’s contact sport played on roller skates. Didn’t understand what the hell was going on, but I had a great time. Weirdest thing I’ve been _offered_ though, damn, that’s a long list. Live animals, sex, incredibly haunted items, all sorts.”

“I’ll stick with money,” Alex said dryly.

“Your loss, man, seriously. I got invited to a wedding as payment once, that was great. But I guess you do get the benefits package, so at least there’s that.”

“Why don’t you just go straight?” Alex asked, and rolled his eyes when Michael smirked. “Okay, I walked into that.”

“You full-on sprinted. Scheduling, mainly.” Michael took another pull of his beer and leaned back, the pressure of his foot against Alex’s shifting slightly. “I call the shots, and I get to do it how I like.”

“So do we, a lot of the time. And we get backup.”

Michael looked around, exaggerated. “You don’t seem to have a partner right now.”

“My last one quit, they haven’t replaced him yet.”

“Ooh, no bureaucracy either.” Michael snapped his fingers. “I hear you guys have to fill out a lotta forms, and take exams and do formal training and all that. Not really my scene.”

“I’m getting that impression,” Alex said dryly, and maybe it was Michael’s smirk, maybe it was the beer, but Alex pressed his foot back against Michael’s and watched his smile grow. He watched Michael’s eyes track the movement of his mouth as well, when he lifted his bottle to take a gulp of beer. “Six years though,” he said, putting the bottle down. “That’s a long time, for a shade.”

Michael shrugged with his mouth more than his shoulders. “Not if it’s on and off. I take jobs when I need to, or for people I know.”

“People you know?”

“Sure. Everyone wants to know the local shade, right? Remember Maria DeLuca’s mom?”

“She wasn’t a shade,” Alex said abruptly, and was immediately a little embarrassed by how defensive he was. No matter that he was a shade himself – being known as a shade was still a mark against a normal person. Not that Mimi had ever been normal, but still. It was like hearing someone say she slept around or swindled her customers.

“Sure she was.” Michael raised an eyebrow at his tone. “Everyone knew where to go if they heard a bump in the night.”

Alex had to concede that, even if it made him uncomfortable. Mimi had been the first person to tell him that his sensitivity didn’t have to be a bad thing, after all. She and Maria were touched, as she called it, and she always said Alex and Rosa had it too. Liz had vacillated between being jealous at them sharing something she didn’t, and glad that she never saw the things they did.

“She doesn’t do that anymore then?” he asked.

“Nah.” Michael grimaced. “She’s, uh. In an assisted living facility now.”

“Wait, what?” Alex did the math quickly, horrified. “She’s not even fifty-five, what’s wrong with her?”

“Early onset dementia, or something like it.” Michael sighed. “Sucks, right? I remember when she used to rule the Pony, but Maria had to take over, and she owns it now.”

“You know Maria?”

“Sure.” Michael lifted a shoulder. “The Pony’s my regular. But I’m the guy people go to now if they get spooked. Way faster than calling up a legit agency and waiting four months for one of you to show up.”

“The wait time is not that long,” Alex huffed.

“Can be,” Michael said, unrepentant. “Sides, a lot of it isn’t urgent. Not worth the call out or the cost, or it’s something that affects too many people to figure out who should take responsibility for calling the shade.”

“Like what?”

“Mmm. Last job I did in Roswell was the gas station off the 380, I think.”

“What gas station?”

“Exactly.” Michael grinned. “Used to be one, probably about fifty years before we were born. Then outta nowhere, it starts lighting up at night, luring people in. Wasn’t _doing_ anything to them, just making them lose time and freak out. Most of ‘em said they saw a white mule deer, a big buck with weird eyes.”

“How’d you deal with it?” Alex knew what he would have done, but he was interested to hear what Michael’s process was.

But Michael looked squirrelly all of a sudden, taking another big gulp of beer to stall. “Trade secret,” he said finally. “Maybe I’ll tell you later. What’s the official way of handling something like that? Is there an official name for it?”

“Category 6-c haunting,” Alex said after a moment, deciding to let it go for now. “Probably, anyway. Protocol for that is a standard banishing.”

“6-c, huh? That’s cute.” Michael took another drink, and Alex matched him. Heat uncurled in the pit of his stomach as Michael’s foot shifted forward, their ankles pressing together. “Always sounded stressful, being a legal shade.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Told where to go, how to do things…I don’t know, I figured there’s a reason there’s a three-year burnout period.”

“It’s not that bad.” Alex could see chest hair in the V of Michael’s button-down, and watched as Michael’s good hand rubbed a line through the condensation on his beer bottle, fingers tapping on its neck. He rubbed his ankle against Michael’s under the table, and felt his heart rate kick up a notch as Michael sucked in a quick breath through his nose, eyes dark when they met Alex’s. “And you are allowed to say no to jobs, you know,” he added, as though nothing was happening, still a little cautious in case this wasn’t going where he thought it was. “You’re allowed to specify certain things you won’t do.”

“You got a blacklist?” Michael asked, and Alex nodded.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” It was definitely Michael’s turn to be forthcoming.

Michael drank again while he thought, and Alex had to follow suit to keep up. “I don’t like the big ones, I guess,” he said finally. “Anywhere the haunt or whatever’s actually killed someone, I’m not a fan. But I’ve only ever tried doing one of those, because usually you guys get called in automatically by the cops or whoever, so it’s not like it’s something I turn down a lot. I don’t know. They’re all pretty similar to me. It’s the people who make the difference.”

Alex frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“Well I’m never taking another client who lives more than an hour’s drive from their nearest town.” Michael laughed and shook his head. “I’m done with that. I almost got shot by some nutcase who wanted to lure a shade out to his murder basement and try some ultra-dark banishment ritual with my actual beating heart. That was wild. And there was the lady who tried to poison me, that was weird. She kept saying it’d been an accident, but I really don’t think it was. And the guy who tried to convince me to head out into the desert with him at four in the morning because he was sure he’d seen an apparition of his dead uncle telling him where to find buried treasure. And – oh man, this insanely creepy couple, they called me out to their place and started telling me all about how the atom bomb testing back in the forties had created a layer of…I don’t know what they called it, ghost vapour or some shit, and this ghost vapour meant we were cursed by God? Oh, okay, that’s definitely top of my blacklist – religious freaks. Can’t deal with them. Secular or at least keeping it polite, that’s all I ask.” He shook his head. “Exorcisms, man. Can’t do ‘em, won’t do ‘em.”

Alex stared at him, suddenly appreciating the vetting process his clients had to go through before he would actually meet them. “Shit.”

“Eh, it’s a living, right?” Michael smiled, crooked and stupidly beautiful. “What about you then?”

“No leeches.” That was easy. “No grieving clients. Nothing underground.”

“Underground?”

“I did an abandoned mine job.” Alex pressed his lips together for a second. “Ghasts made me think the tunnel was collapsing, and I panicked. One of the only jobs I couldn’t complete.”

Michael nodded. “Should’ve put leeches on my list too.” He lifted his bottle with a wry smile and Alex sighed and clinked his own against it. It took a very stable shade with a very happy life to volunteer for a leeching job. Anything that could get in your head and bring up your worst memories was a hard no for anyone with a traumatic past. At this point, Alex didn’t know what a leech would put him through first – his dad smashing Michael’s hand while Alex had been incapable of stopping him, or his foot being blown off. Hopefully he would never find out.

Michael finished his beer, and Alex’s breath caught as he slid his foot slowly up the inside of his calf. “So I was thinking,” he said casually, setting his empty bottle aside. “We could maybe relocate. Maybe deal with the heavy conversation in a bit.”

“And deal with something else first?” Alex said, tilting his head with the barest hint of a smile. Michael’s eyes dipped, then flicked back up to his, and Alex was fucking gone, he didn’t even know why he was pretending otherwise.

“My motel’s nearby.”

“Motel 6?”

“Day’s End.” Michael smiled slightly. “You might be closer.”

“I am.” Alex finished his beer in two gulps and set the bottle down with a decided movement. “Shall we?”

Michael grinned, and the pressure on Alex’s leg vanished as he slid out of the booth, sweeping his hat up onto his head as he did. “Lead the way, shade.”

They walked out together, shoulders brushing, and Alex tried to persuade himself that he wasn’t nervous, wasn’t desperate. He felt like he was seventeen again, bowled over by Michael Guerin and his heavy-lidded eyes. He sneaked a look at Michael and found that Michael was looking right back at him, and they both grinned at the same time.

“Happy birthday, by the way,” Michael said, reaching up to push his hat further onto his head as a gust of wind blew down the road.

Alex knew better than to be touched that he knew, but he couldn’t help it. “Thanks.”

The way to the motel was along the highway, and they walked in silence so they wouldn’t be raising their voices over the rush of the cars and trucks barrelling alongside them. When the motel came into view, Michael’s hand brushed his. Alex didn’t want to take it, not when they were in full view of so many cars, but he stretched his fingers out to prolong the contact, the backs of their knuckles knocking together, fingers almost sliding between each other’s for a second. 

They kept it up all the way there, and once they were past the lobby, Michael twisted his hand to draw one of his fingers down the centre of Alex’s palm, a tease that had Alex’s heart going far faster than it should.

He was on the ground floor, and as he slid the key card into the handle, Michael leaned in close behind him, heat radiating from his body, close enough for Alex to feel his breath on the back of his neck. He shoved the door open and turned as he stepped in, facing Michael and ready for the way Michael moved into him like he was magnetised, sweeping his hat off his head.

The door wasn’t even closed when Michael kissed him, lunging forward and curling his good hand around the side of Alex’s neck, his hat hitting the ground with a quiet bump. Alex could only hold on and kiss back, relief as sharp as sorrow sweeping through his whole body. Michael held him tight with his other arm around Alex’s waist and Alex tried to touch him everywhere at once as the door clicked shut, hands dragging down Michael’s sides and over his shoulders, one hand pressing to Michael’s neck and into his hair for a wonderful moment before he needed to touch Michael’s chest, swaying a little and feeling Michael sway with him.

Michael’s mouth was hot, his stubbled upper lip a sharp miracle as Alex kissed it, a quiet noise punched out of him when Michael sucked on his lower lip and slid his other hand up, both palms warm against Alex’s jaw, holding him and moving his head as Michael changed the angle, kissed him harder.

It was perfect, everything he’d ever wanted, and Alex dragged Michael closer against him with both hands at the small of his back. Michael hummed and rubbed his thumb along Alex’s cheekbone, his fingers meeting and tangling at the back of his neck. 

It had been so long since their first kiss that Alex couldn’t even remember what it had been like. He knew Michael had kissed him first, in the UFO Emporium, and he remembered being shocked and wary and hopeful all at once, and he remembered realising Michael was serious and kissing him back, but he couldn’t remember how it had _felt,_ only that it had been good.

Michael softened against him, pulling away and pressing their foreheads together, and Alex didn’t open his eyes. They were both breathing hard, and Michael was cradling his head so gently. Alex breathed in and out, and hoped desperately, though he didn’t know what for. When he opened his eyes, Michael was looking back at him, mouth open and expression…God, so relieved. Peaceful. Alex’s eyes fluttered closed again as Michael’s good hand slid down a little, his thumb sweeping a soft line down his cheek to the corner of his lips. Alex didn’t think before turning his face to kiss it, and Michael’s other hand tightened against his neck in response.

They were still in the dark, and the key card was still in Alex’s hand. “Let me just,” he muttered, Michael’s thumb still hot against his lips. “The light…”

“Right, yeah.” Michael laughed quietly and moved out of Alex’s space, sliding his left hand down to hold onto Alex’s shoulder. “Sorry.”

“Don’t.” Alex took a breath for courage and leaned in to kiss him again, slow and soft. “Don’t,” he whispered as they parted, and Michael nodded.

“No apologies,” he breathed. “Got it.”

Alex slotted the key card into its socket and the lights came on with a dubious flicker, the air conditioning unit whirring to life a second later. It was a very blue motel room, small and boring, with Alex’s limited clutter on the desk and the bed freshly made.

“C’mere,” Michael muttered, reeling Alex in with a finger through his belt loop, and Alex couldn’t help the smile that crept onto his face. He reached up and curled his hand into his hair. Michael smiled back at him, and then they were kissing again.

Distantly, Alex was amazed at how easy it was between them. He remembered his second ever attempt at sex, years after the tool shed, and being disappointed. His third and fourth times hadn’t been anything to write home about either, and while it had gotten better after that, nothing had ever come close to the blurry memories of Michael taking his shirt off in the tool shed, kissing his chest, letting Alex touch him and hiding none of his responses.

This was better than any of it.

Alex had only had sex once since losing his leg, and he’d been slightly drunk, and very nervous. He was always nervous in bed, he felt, or at least wary and on edge, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, whatever that shoe might be.

Michael made it all easy. He hid nothing, gave everything, and kissed Alex like the building could have burned down around them and he wouldn’t notice. Alex found his own awareness of their surroundings shrinking too. The world outside the motel room ceased to exist, and then shrank to just the bed, and then only his body and what Michael was doing to it, and what he was doing to Michael.

They had no lube or condoms – Alex hadn’t been planning for this – but that was no barrier. Michael panted and groaned as Alex knelt between his legs and sucked him down, wrapping his arms around Michael’s thighs and losing himself in it, squeezing his thumb in his fist to help relax his throat and relishing the way Michael filled his mouth. Overwhelming, inexorable, he swallowed around him and pressed one hand flat to Michael’s stomach under his shirt, savouring the cracked, broken noises Michael made for him, just for him.

Michael propped himself up against the headboard afterwards and pulled Alex back against his chest to jerk him off, mouthing at his neck and touching him, caressing him. He unbuttoned Alex’s shirt slowly, and Alex closed his eyes and let Michael kiss his neck, figuring out far too fast how much Alex liked it. His good hand pushed his pants open and reached in to stroke Alex’s cock while his left swept across his chest, danced down to his hips, dragged up his thighs, his stomach, up to his neck to tilt Alex’s chin to the side so Michael could kiss behind his ear, teeth just grazing against the thin skin there.

Alex was helpless, drunk on the heat of Michael’s skin, the pressure of his legs either side of his own, the slowly growing hardness at the small of his back. They were still almost fully dressed, shirts open but still on their shoulders, pants unbuttoned but still on. He groaned and twisted his head, chasing Michael’s fingers until he got the message and let Alex suck the two good ones into his mouth. His chest lurched against Alex’s back when Alex transferred his attention to his ring and pinkie finger next, mapping out the swollen, broken shapes of them with his tongue. When he gasped, high and gorgeous, Alex shuddered and came.

There was a box of tissues on the nightstand, and Michael used a couple of those to clean off his hand, his breathing hot on Alex’s neck. They were both still wearing their boots, getting dust on the bedspread. Alex took a deep breath and sat forward, and Michael followed him, hands sliding up his arms to tug gently at the edges of his open shirt – a question. Alex shifted his arms back in answer and Michael slid the shirt off him and leaned forward again to press his chest to Alex’s bare back. He was so warm, and Alex remembered that. He remembered loving Michael’s warmth.

He didn’t want to think about the tool shed. They were miles from Roswell, in a locked motel room. They were anonymous, and as safe as they probably could be. He turned to kiss Michael again, and Michael sighed into his mouth. 

Alex sat on the edge of the bed to take off his boots and laughed when Michael kicked his off and they landed in opposite corners of the room. It slowed to a smile when Michael plastered himself against Alex’s back again and reached around to help him push his jeans and underwear down past his hips. He stroked Alex’s chest and stomach and kept dropping little kisses along his neck and shoulders while Alex pulled up his right jeans leg high enough to unlatch his prosthesis, pretending he wasn’t nervous. Michael’s lazy kisses helped. The lack of comments when Alex pulled his prosthetic leg free and set it carefully aside helped even more.

Alex shoved his jeans off, socks too, and found that he couldn’t turn around, too aware that he was now completely naked apart from the liner that still covered his stump, and Michael was still almost fully clothed. Like a mind reader, Michael leaned back, and a second later Alex saw his shirt hit the ground, and he smiled. He turned, twisting on the bed, and Michael leaned backwards to lie down, pushing his jeans off as Alex reached to help by pulling. He grinned up at Alex with such an obvious come-hither waggle of his eyebrows that Alex couldn’t help but snort and climb on top of him.

The skin contact was incredible. Again, Alex remembered the tool shed, and again he pushed those memories away. He didn’t want to think about that – he wanted to think about what he was doing now. Michael under him, holding onto him, kissing him and kissing him and kissing him.

They went another round, paused to clean up, and Alex thought they would maybe talk then, but instead they ended up going for a third, at which point Alex removed his liner, and after that they were both too tired to do anything but collapse and sleep. Alex had had the presence of mind to put the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door between rounds two and three, and his last thought as he drifted off to sleep was of dizzy relief. He was pretty sure this was just blowing off some convenient steam for Michael, and if he thought about that in any real detail it might hurt, but Alex hadn’t felt so good in his body in years. He’d never had sex so miraculously free of hesitation or awkwardness. He’d never felt safe enough to sleep so easily with someone sharing his bed, but for some reason he felt safe with Michael.


	2. Wednesday 25th August 2021

Alex woke before Michael did, and thanked his habit-bound past self for not being so caught up in Michael last night that he’d forgotten to leave his crutches next to the bed. He grabbed his discarded liner from last night and draped it over his shoulder as he hopped to the bathroom to piss and brush his teeth, and he only hesitated for a moment before getting back into bed when he was done. It was only seven, after all (and holy shit, it was _seven_, he’d actually slept through the whole night), and he had nowhere to be.

He couldn’t get back to sleep, so he watched Michael for a minute, mesmerised by his face in sleep. He almost started imagining a future, but shut that down quickly. Michael still lived in Roswell, he’d come to Alex for help with the Evans twins, and they’d engaged in some mutually satisfying recreational sex. It was enough that they’d reconnected like this, he told himself, and pretended that it was true.

Michael shifted in his sleep, turning his face towards Alex as his arm pulled the sheet down. Alex bit his lip, then gave into temptation and leaned down to press his lips very lightly to Michael’s stomach, just below his bellybutton. Once wasn’t enough, he discovered immediately, licking his lips. Once would apparently never be enough with Michael. He closed his eyes and kissed the same spot, hair surprisingly soft against his lips, the scent of Michael thick in his nose. He reached out with one hand to steady himself on Michael’s chest and kissed a slow trail up. 

He didn’t really intend to wake Michael, and maybe his kisses wouldn’t have done, but the way he couldn’t stop himself stroking his hand up and down Michael’s chest did. Michael hummed and lifted his hand up to his eyes, rubbing them as he woke up properly and smiled when Alex lifted his head. “Hey.”

“You’re awake.” Was seven early for Michael? Alex lay down again, suddenly uncertain even in the face of Michael’s smile.

“Best wake up I’ve had for a long time,” Michael drawled, voice rough from sleep, and he pushed himself up on his elbow and swept his other hand down the length of Alex’s arm, past his elbow and down to where the sheet lay over his hip. “It’s a good morning.”

“Yeah?” His worries ebbed away, and Alex reached up to brush his fingers up the curve of Michael’s neck, watching as Michael’s eyes fell shut and he relaxed into the touch. It was captivating, seeing his eyelids fall, his head lift to follow Alex’s hand, watching calm spread outwards from his own touch. Michael turned his face into Alex’s palm when Alex reached it, and breathed out against the pad of his thumb, head drooping low so Alex’s hand slid into his hair as he dipped down to kiss Alex’s chest in a gentle trail up to his mouth.

His breath was bad, but Alex didn’t care. He pulled Michael on top of him and hummed when Michael rolled his hips, already hard.

So that was round four, and Alex found himself reluctant to get out of bed afterwards. “You said this was gonna be a heavy conversation,” he muttered, curled against Michael’s side with one arm sprawled across his chest, his hand in Michael’s hair. He didn’t usually let himself get cuddly after sex, but Michael had started it, so he’d figured it was okay. “Should we put clothes on?”

“Probably.” Michael sighed and curled one hand around Alex’s bicep, keeping his arm pinned across his chest. “I kinda don’t want to though.”

“Mm.” Alex closed his eyes and let himself savour it for a few more seconds before pushing himself up. “Sooner we do this, the sooner we can have breakfast.”

“True.” Michael looked up at him, expression resigned. “Can I use the shower?”

“Sure.”

Alex got in after him, using the cheap plastic stool he’d gotten from the reception desk on his first night. He was a pro at showering sitting down now, in shower cubicles and bathtubs of all shapes and sizes. Michael was dressed when he came out, and Alex kept his eyes averted while he pulled his own clothes on, because if he saw Michael watching him he knew he’d end up angling for round five. 

He realised with a weird feeling in the pit of his stomach that he’d had more sex with Michael Guerin in this motel room in the space of less than twelve hours than he’d had for the past five years put together.

“Okay,” he said at last, sitting down on the end of the bed, opposite where Michael was sat in the desk chair. “Talk. You said this has something to do with the Evans twins?”

“Yeah.” Michael took a deep breath. “Yeah. Okay. They disappeared, and I’m pretty sure…okay, um.” He licked his lips, one leg jumping. The fingers of his good hand tapped a restless rhythm on his thigh, and he kept ducking his head to avoid Alex’s eyes. Nervous as all hell, basically, and Alex could feel himself tensing in response.

“Maybe start from the beginning?” he suggested, and Michael laughed weakly.

“Sure, why not. I can’t. I mean. Fuck.” He dropped his head into his hands and scrubbed them across his face. “Okay.” He lifted his head at last and met Alex’s eyes. “You know how we’re both shades?”

“Yeah?”

“My sensitivity is completely different to yours.” Michael took a deep breath. “I see things – I sense things – completely differently to everyone else. You see apparitions as, as black dogs, or screamers, or, or whatever. I don’t see those, I never have.”

Alex frowned. Ghosts and other entities could appear differently to different people, but it was rare, and that didn’t sound like what Michael was describing. “What do you see?”

“Electromagnetic disturbances.” Michael swallowed. “I see them as, like, I don’t know. Like…a disturbance, distortions, I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“Okay.” Alex had no idea where he was going with it, but he was prepared to entertain it at the very least.

“It’s the same for Max and Isobel.”

“They’re not shades.”

“No. And they’re not my friends either. They’re my family.”

“Your…what?”

“You know they’re adopted, right?”

Everyone knew, and Alex nodded, uncertain. “Sure.”

“We were all found together, when we were kids. They got adopted together, but I got left in the system, didn’t find them again till I was eleven. Doesn’t matter – point is, we’re family, and they have sensitivity like I do. None of us get our senses hijacked like normal people do, and they haven’t tested it, but I can’t be possessed, and a lot of the physical shit ghosts try just straight-up doesn’t work on me. None of the mental stuff works either.”

“You said you avoided leeches yesterday,” Alex said, trying to figure out where Michael was going with this.

“No, I said they’d be on my blacklist, I didn’t say they were. All that stuff slides right off me. I can feel them trying it, but it doesn’t work. And I can…you use equipment and rituals to banish or exorcise, but I don’t need any of that. I just –” He waved his hands in the air like he was flapping smoke away. “And they go.”

Alex had no idea what to make of that. He sat back on the bed, eyes narrow. “That’s not possible.”

“It is.” Michael swallowed. “If you’re not human.”

Jesus Christ. Alex didn’t know whether to keep Michael calm or bolt for an exit. Panic and something that felt horribly like grief were rising in his mind. Michael was clearly sick, and Alex had…shit, Alex had, they’d slept together, he’d – 

“Alex?” Michael had gone very still, and Alex made himself take two deep breaths, and then a third for good measure.

“Okay,” he said, deciding on the calming approach. “If you’re not human, what are you?” 

He was expecting werewolf or vampire. Those were the most common delusions in their line of work, though he’d once heard of a shade who’d become convinced she was a selkie and ended up drowning herself. He was not expecting Michael to say, “I’m not from around here, is what I mean.”

“So where are you from?” Alex asked carefully, and watched as Michael hesitated, then lifted a hand and pointed at the ceiling. Alex’s empty stomach churned. Religious delusions were rare, but not unheard of. “Heaven?” 

Michael shook his head, lowering his hand and looking at his knees. “Think about where we grew up.”

Alex thought about it. “I think you’re in the wrong genre,” he heard himself say, and tensed to run (idiot, idiot, don’t provoke the delusional person), but Michael just snorted and ducked his head again.

“Yeah, tell me about it. Um, I can prove it though. I know me saying it doesn’t mean shit, so.” He looked to the side, where Alex’s pile of clutter had been semi-neatly corralled by whoever had cleaned his room yesterday. 

Alex didn’t freak out when one of his pens lifted into the air. He’d seen poltergeists and other haunts do the same sort of thing, after all. He did started to freak out a little bit when his notepad lifted into the air and opened at a blank page. The pen clicked, and Alex watched in wide-eyed silence as it started to write on the page.

_I promise I’m not lying,_ it wrote in wobbly letters, and when Alex looked at Michael he was frowning in apparent concentration at the pen.

“Not that I don’t believe you,” he said slowly as the pen and notepad lowered themselves onto the desk again, “but…”

“I couldn’t go legal because they require blood tests,” Michael said tiredly. “We look normal on the outside, but it’s pretty obvious we’re not human once you get our cells under a microscope, trust me. If you had one, I’d swab my cheek and show you. Look,” he said, slumping in the uncomfortable chair. “My telekinesis is pretty good. Tell me to do something, I’ll do it.”

Alex looked around. “Okay. Float the phone charger.” He’d barely finished speaking when it tugged itself from the wall by the bed and soared into the air. “Make it a circle.” It curved, floating slowly until it was hovering between them. “A square.” Michael frowned, and the circle pointed at four corners. “An eight.” It became that too, and Alex stood up, suddenly freaking out for a whole new reason. “Are you really an alien?”

“Yeah.” Michael reached out and plucked the phone charger from the air, standing as well. “And so’re Max and Isobel.”

“Where do you come from?”

“We don’t know. We woke up in ’97, and none of us remember anything about where we came from.”

“What do you mean, you woke up?” Alex tried to keep his voice steady and made sure to keep himself still, even though he wanted to inch towards the door. 

“The UFO crash, in ’47? That was us.” Michael sighed. “Someone…we don’t know who, or…someone hid our pods in a cave a way away from the crash site, and we woke up fifty years later. Wandered out into the desert, no memories, no language, no freaking clothes, nothing.” Michael pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “We don’t know anything about who or what we are, but that isn’t the point. The point is, Max and Isobel are missing, and so’s Isobel’s husband, and so’re our pods, and I can’t find them. Something’s happened in Roswell, I don’t know what.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like…it’s like a town-wide haunting, I don’t know. But I can’t get through to anyone, and there’s…shit, I don’t know how to explain it.” Michael sat down again and dropped his head into his hands. “I don’t know what anyone else is seeing! I need someone who sees things the way humans do to help me figure out what’s happened, and I can’t call any real shades in because they might find out what we are. I was only outta town a few days, doing a job near San Antonio, and when I got back the whole town was hazed up. I can’t…I don’t know what happened.” His voice was tight, thin with panic, and Alex swallowed and sat down on the edge of the bed.

He’d heard clients use that exact helpless tone when describing whatever was happening to them, and he had to force himself not to react with his professional voice. “Okay. Go back to the alien thing.”

Michael gave him a wary look, sitting back in his chair and opening his body up. Shoulders back, hands palm-down on his thighs, legs widening a little. Exposing himself, concealing nothing. Alex took a breath and tried to mirror him a little, putting his own hands on his knees and sitting up straight, trying to set him at ease. Michael’s mouth twisted, like he knew exactly what Alex was trying to do, and it wasn’t working on him at all. “What d’you wanna know?”

“What do your cells look like under a microscope? How different are we talking here?”

“I’m not a biologist,” Michael said shortly, and Alex nodded, holding back a sigh of annoyance.

“Fair enough. What are the limits of your telekinesis? Can you float something else for me?”

“Sure.”

“The pillows?”

Michael’s lips twisted again, and he looked behind Alex. Alex turned to see both pillows hovering steadily in the air a couple of feet above the mattress. They weren’t shaking or wobbling at all, and Alex let out a breath. “Okay. What about something heavier?”

“Whatever you want.” The pillows dropped back onto the bed, and Alex looked at Michael again.

“Could you lift the bed?”

“Yeah. You wanna get off it first, or…?”

Alex stood again, and held his breath as the bed rose into the air as smoothly as if it was on wires. When a poltergeist or some other strong ghost moved things, it wasn’t smooth like this. It was always jerky and erratic, all brute force, no subtlety. He looked at Michael, who kept his eyes on the bed, hands on his thighs. If he really was doing this, it didn’t look like it was straining him in the slightest.

“Could you lift me?” Alex asked before he lost his nerve.

“Yeah.” Michael glanced at him. “Want me to put the bed down first?”

“Do you need to?”

“No.” Michael stood up though, and stepped back so he could keep the bed and Alex in his direct line of sight. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” He’d been pushed by ghosts before, and he knew what that felt like. When Michael moved him, it was nothing like that. It was like the world around him moved instead, in relation to him. Like he was the fixed point around which his environment revolved. There were no pressure points or sensations of contact at all, and he didn’t even make it two inches off the ground before he gasped, “Down.”

His foot, which had drooped at the ankle as the floor descended away from him, found solid land again, and his knees wobbled, hand flying out to grab the edge of the desk. Heat rose in his chest and face at being so obviously freaked out, but Michael just watched, expression carefully blank.

The bed hadn’t even trembled.

Alex raced through the responses that leapt to his mind. They all included a lot of profanity. He took a deep breath and let go of the desk. “Again.”

Something he couldn’t read flickered across Michael’s expression, and the world moved around him a second later. 

It was intensely, intensely weird. Like what he’d always imagined anti-gravity to feel like, but also not, because he could still feel its effects on his limbs. He was still oriented towards the Earth, but Michael had just moved it further away from him. Only by a couple of inches, the toe of his foot still brushing the carpet, and he took a deep breath before looking down. “Can you lift me higher?”

“High as you want,” Michael said quietly, and Alex fought very, very hard to keep his composure as the ground moved away by another couple of inches. The strangest thing was hard to pinpoint. Was it the lack of pressure on any part of his body? The way his prosthesis hung on his stump, no longer pressing into it from below? The way his arms felt heavy and slow?

He lifted one, just to be sure that he could, and saw Michael narrow his eyes just a fraction, like he was concentrating harder to allow it. Perhaps that wasn’t what was happening at all – Alex didn’t feel any real resistance. But when he wiggled his fingers, he did feel something, almost like he was moving them underwater, like the air around them was thicker than it should be. Testing, he flung his arm out quickly, and tensed when the bed tilted slightly to the side, and his arm moved slightly slower than it should.

“Down,” he whispered, and the ground rose up to meet him. “Okay. You can, um. You can put the bed down too.”

“Thanks.” It lowered itself silently, and after a second Alex sat on the end of it again, and waited for Michael to take the chair like he had before. It took him a second, and he frowned while he did it. “You believe me now?”

“I definitely believe you more.” Alex could feel his heart in his chest, thumping away much faster than it should be. “Can you move yourself like that?”

“Not really.” Michael’s expression was unreadable. “Doesn’t work so well on me.” Alex didn’t ask why, and Michael sighed explosively. “Look, I get that this is a lot, but I need help here, okay? I can’t find Max and Isobel, I can’t find them anywhere, and something’s screwing with Roswell in a really big way, and I know it’s got something to do with them and I can’t figure out what! We’ve kept this secret our whole lives, we swore never to tell _anyone_, but I’m out of options here.” He met Alex’s eyes, serious and a little bit scared. “If you don’t believe me, or you don’t wanna come back, I get it. No one’ll believe you if you start mouthing off; they’ll think the job got to you. And it won’t matter if I can’t find them anyway, nothing matters if I can’t find them.” He stopped, his breath shaking as he inhaled, and Alex tried to find his way back to rational thoughts.

He believed in extra-terrestrial life, sure, in the sense that he thought it was pretty self-centred to think that the condition of life was unique to Earth in a practically infinite universe. That extra-terrestrial life looked so human, and had really landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? That was the bit he was struggling with.

But it was Michael. Michael Guerin, who had stolen his guitar from the music room and tuned it up, who had kissed him in the UFO Emporium, who had smiled afterwards like he’d figured something out. Michael, who Alex had loved so much it still ached in him over a decade later. And Michael was looking down at his knees with his brow furrowed, shoulders hunched like he was bracing himself for a blow, for disappointment. 

Alex had enlisted to protect him. He’d gone to war for him, in a way. What was the point of that if he didn’t help when Michael asked him? His mangled left hand was right there, resting on his thigh. And even without all that baggage…Michael made Alex feel young again, like he could exist in a space apart from his own burdens. Michael made him feel lighter, even now, even as adults with a whole extra decade of shit they’d both lived through.

He touched Michael’s knee, and waited for Michael to compose himself and look at him. “I sent off the paperwork for my last job yesterday,” Alex told him quietly. “I can take a week, but that’s it.”

The relief that flooded Michael’s face almost hurt to look at. “You’ll come?”

Back to Roswell? To the place Alex had sworn he would never, ever return to? Only Michael Guerin could have asked and received a yes.

Alex nodded. “We’d better get going.”

They took Michael’s truck. Alex checked his van into a shade-friendly garage after taking out everything he thought he’d need, and they got breakfast on their way out of town. Coffee and doughnuts, and snacks and sandwiches for later. Michael put the radio on to fill the silence, and Alex took the time to stop freaking out and work through his remaining panic. 

The scenery outside the truck barely changed, and Alex watched it go by. Scrubland and desert shrubs blurring as Michael drove, the huge blue sky arching overhead. Shades worked best in the land they knew because they were more attuned to the differences in the atmosphere when they occurred. Someone from east of the Mississippi would come to the desert and not know if something was wrong, because it was all wrong for them, just as Alex hadn’t been able to tell what was off when he’d tried being a shade up north.

This was his home. The sand and sagebrush and huge open skies were under his skin, in his bones, and he was having to come to terms with the fact that the same wasn’t true for Michael. Michael wasn’t rooted to the land the way Alex was. He wasn’t even rooted to the planet.

Michael Guerin was an alien. And somehow that was taking a backseat to Alex freaking out about what the hell he was doing, driving back to Roswell with him. The place he knew his dad still lived. He might have enlisted partially under threat, but he’d still latched onto the escape the Air Force had provided and never returned to Roswell even on leave, even after his injury. He’d kept up as much distance between him and his dad as possible, and that had started because of what had happened in the tool shed. At least one of the major reasons he’d stayed away was to try to protect Michael, and how he was blithely riding right back into town with the same guy he’d wanted to keep safe, flaunting it under his father’s nose?

He’d told Michael he could only take a week, but getting into his truck and letting Michael drive them out of Las Cruces felt a lot more serious than that. How many people would he ever drop his whole life to follow like this? Maybe Maria or Liz, if they reappeared and asked for his help like Michael had. But they’d been his best friends – he actually knew them, or had done. He’d barely known Michael when they were kids, and he certainly didn’t know him now.

Michael drove with one hand on the steering wheel, his other arm resting on the open window like a trucker. Even driving, he sprawled with his legs spread, hair blown about by the wind. He pulled the sun visor down rather than wear sunglasses, and the shade cut across his face and highlighted the sharpness of his jaw. If he could feel Alex looking at him, he didn’t say anything, and Alex tried not to make it obvious. 

Studying Michael’s exterior gave him nothing to go on. And a night and a morning of (admittedly spectacular) sex and half a serious conversation shouldn’t have been enough for any sane person to drop their life and follow along like Alex was doing. He had no idea what the hell he was doing, but every time he thought of asking Michael to turn around and take him back to Las Cruces it was like he hit a wall in his head. 

Michael had crashed back into his life out of nowhere, and Alex didn’t understand why he couldn’t resist. He didn’t even have the excuse of teenage hormones this time – he was just crazy for Michael Guerin. 

It was all kind of a lot.

An hour into the drive, just after they’d passed the White Sands Memorial, Alex finally spoke. “I can’t believe I’ve slept with an alien.”

Michael glanced at him, but Alex kept staring out of the window ahead of them. “I’ve only ever slept with humans,” he said after a moment. “So I can’t really compare. Could you tell I was different at all?”

“No!” Alex slumped back on the bench and pushed a hand through his hair. “Jesus. I can’t believe you kissed me in the UFO Emporium.”

“You’re the one who took me back there! If you think about it, it’s kinda romantic?”

“I’ve been kissed by an alien in the Roswell UFO Emporium,” Alex said, trying the sentence out loud. 

“Story for the grandkids?”

Alex laughed, slightly strangled. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“Are you freaking out?” Michael looked at him again. “We can turn around, if you’ve changed your mind.”

“If we get to Roswell and it turns out all of this was a lie, I’ll never speak to you again,” Alex told him, and finally looked over at him. “But I’m not backing out now.”

Michael’s smile made his stomach flip over, and Alex looked forward again quickly. “Alright, more information now. When exactly did you get back from your job in Texas? Give me a timeline here.”

“Last week, Friday evening.”

“The twentieth?”

“Yeah.”

“So, what, you drove into town and…?”

Michael sighed. “I drove in off the 380, and it started looking weird after I crossed the Pecos. I’ve got a map back at home I can show you, I figured out the rough cut-off point, but it shifts. It’s not static, and I have no idea what makes it move.”

“What’s _it,_ Guerin?”

“The haze. It’s…I don’t know how to describe it.” Michael frowned. “It’s like…I don’t know, like heat shimmers, but kinda staticky. I can hear it too, like…you know the sound electrical appliances make? Like fluorescent bulbs and dodgy outlets?”

“Like a sort of high-pitched –?”

“Yeah, exactly. Sorta like that, and I just know, like my sense of…I don’t know, gravity or balance or whatever, I can feel it being messed with.”

That was incredibly weird. “Okay.”

Michael shrugged. “I’m used to it. So yeah, the haze, that’s what I call it with Max and Isobel.”

“And it’s all over town?”

“Yeah. Normally I can disrupt it pretty easy, but there’s so much of it…I’ve tried. I tried to clear it all out, but I can’t do it on my own, there’s just too much. It comes back as soon as I’ve cleared a bit, and that’s never happened before. I don’t know what to do.” Michael rubbed his forehead with his broken hand and sighed. “I’m sure it has something to do with Max and Isobel.”

“Go back,” Alex instructed, getting his phone out to take notes. “You came into town and saw the haze. What then?”

“Freaked out a bit. Never seen anything like it, y’know? I got out by the RV park and tried clearing it a bit, but gave up on that pretty quick. I could tell it was thicker in town anyway, so I headed in. It’s weird.” He sighed again. “The haze usually concentrates in little pockets, and even if they move, they stay small – the effect is limited – but this is like a fog, it’s everywhere. And people are going about their normal lives like nothing’s wrong, but I _know_ something is, and I know they’re feeling some of it sometimes, but then they just sort of brush it off like it didn’t happen, and I can’t ask them what they saw. It’s all messed up.”

Alex wrote it all down, as fast as he could. “So you drove into town?”

“Yeah, and I went straight to Isobel’s. She and Noah live in town, so she was closer. But she was gone. House was shut up, but all their stuff was there. Neither of them were answering their phones, and Max didn’t pick up when I called him either.” He took a deep breath. “I checked the Sheriff’s Department next – Max is a cop, and I thought, I don’t know, I thought maybe he’d be at work. But he wasn’t, and when I asked…his partner, she’s called Cam, she was being really weird. It’s like my questions were sliding right off her or something.”

“What do you mean?”

“She knew Max was her partner, but every time I asked if she knew where he was, she just…I don’t know, she’d say something like, he’s not here, or haven’t seen him lately. And when I pushed, she just shrugged me off. She wasn’t worried, and she wouldn’t tell me how long he’d been gone or anything. Like there was some sorta block in her brain.”

Alex had never heard of any supernatural entity being able to influence someone like that, but he typed it all down anyway. “Then what?”

“Went to Max’s house. He lives outside town, on the west side. Same story as Isobel’s place – all shut up, but nothing was out of place, no sign of a struggle, all his stuff was still there. I’ve looked everywhere, and I mean _everywhere_, and I can’t find them, and I can’t feel them.”

“Feel them?” Alex frowned at him. “What do you mean, feel them?”

“Max and Iz have a psychic connection, because they’re twins. I’ve got something like that, but it only surfaces when one of us is hurting or in trouble, something really bad. And I’m not getting anything like that from either of them.” Michael’s hands were tight on the steering wheel, his broken fingers sticking out like twigs. “I drove out to our cave that night, and the pods were gone too. All of them.”

“Okay.” Alex nodded. “What then?”

“Drove back to mine, tried to get some sleep. Started again the next morning, driving around like a crazy person. Spent the next day trying to interrogate people and figure out the limitations of this haunting, if that’s what it is. Then I started looking for you.”

Alex put his phone away. “About that. How did you find me?”

“Buddy of mine has a laptop that used to belong to Superior Shades.” The agency Alex worked for. “They’ve still got access to the database, so I used that. It wasn’t hard. It’s got your motel address and everything.”

“Jesus.” As a former military intelligence officer, the poor security made Alex’s skin crawl. “That’s reassuring.”

“I got there just in time to see you leave last night, and I followed you. Took a while to work up the nerve to say hi, but.” Michael gave him a small smile. “It worked out better than expected.”

“Why me?” Alex frowned at him, not taking the bait. “You must have dozens of contacts if you’ve been a shade for six years. We haven’t even spoken since I left town after high school. How did you even know I was a shade?”

“Isobel told me. She knows your dad; she does event planning round town, so she sees him for stuff like the vet fundraisers and the fourth of July fair.” Michael gave him a quick look. “I knew I’d have to tell anyone I brought in about the alien stuff, and I don’t exactly trust…well, anyone. Hell, there’s stuff I haven’t even told Max and Isobel. I figured…I don’t know. I figured if anyone’s gonna have the power to destroy me, it might as well be you.”

Alex wanted to slide across the bench and press his head to Michael’s shoulder. Maybe kiss his cheek, maybe put his hand on Michael’s thigh and squeeze. He leaned back and watched the horizon instead, breathing out slowly. He’d been trying in a half-hearted way to convince himself that what he and Michael were doing wasn’t deeper than excellent sexual chemistry, but when Michael came out with things like that, what was he supposed to think?

The amount of trust Michael was placing in him was staggering. Alex took a deep breath and moved past it, knowing that was the only way he was going to be able to function. “Tell me about the haze again, and how it’s affecting people.”

Michael had told him that the haze started a couple of kilometres to the west of the relief route that went around the outside of town, and as they approached he looked over at Alex nervously. “Feel anything?”

“No.” Alex scanned the road ahead and the desert either side, even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to see whatever Michael could. “Can you see it already?”

“A little. Just tiny flickers.” They crested the hill, and Roswell came into view, a hazy white and grey sprawl dotted with more greenery the closer they got. Billboards drifted past as Michael drove on, and Alex registered them distantly – In God We Trust, Land for Lease, Super8 Bus and Truck Parking. Thirteen years he’d been away. He didn’t believe in bad luck, but he couldn’t help thinking about it. Would everything be the same? Would anything have changed?

“It looks the same,” he muttered as they crossed the relief route at last.

“Tell me about it. You remember why we’re here, right?” There was a note of fear in Michael’s voice that made Alex frown at him. 

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Tell me.”

“We’re looking for Max and Isobel, and her husband. And your pods. And we’re gonna figure out what’s going on to make people forget about them, or whatever it is that they’re doing.”

“Okay. Just…don’t forget.” Michael glanced at him quickly, his brows drawn together. “I can’t do this on my own.”

“I’ll tell you if I start feeling weird,” Alex assured him.

“I’m just worried you won’t notice. Like a frog in boiling water.”

“My sensitivity might not be alien-level, but it’s pretty good,” Alex said dryly. “What’re you seeing?” He wished there was a way for him to see what Michael did.

“It’s getting thicker, but not much. It’s more concentrated in the centre, I don’t know why.”

“Historic buildings?” Alex suggested.

“Maybe.”

Something flickered out of the corner of Alex’s eye, and he turned sharply. Whatever it was was gone by the time he looked, but he trusted his senses. “That was something. Just a quick apparition, I didn’t see what it was.”

“Eyes peeled then, I guess.” Michael sounded more nervous than Alex had ever heard him. “We’re going right through the centre to get to my place.”

Sanders’ Auto Repair, where Michael apparently had a trailer he lived in, was out on the east side of town. Alex kept his breathing even, and watched.

Something was definitely off, and he muttered his observations as they came to him, trying to concentrate. “The shadows look wrong. Either too dark, or not dark enough, or…okay, that one was definitely the wrong shape. That…”

“Alex?”

“I just saw a bird fly behind that billboard, and it came out on the other side a second too slow.” He cleared his throat, staying calm. “I can smell smoke. Can you?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“How can you tell if something’s an olfactory hallucination?” Michael asked curiously. “I’ve never had one.”

“I don’t know, I’ve just got the knack for it now, I guess. Like I can tell when something I’m looking at is an apparition, or I can tell that something calling my name isn’t actually making any real sound.”

“Wild.”

Alex realised that Michael was an underdeveloped shade, technically speaking. By not experiencing hauntings the way that humans did, he’d never had to develop any sort of sensitivity to the supernatural. A definite chill went down Alex’s neck when they started passing the car dealerships, the big lots and squat buildings suddenly unfamiliar and strange. 

“What?” Michael said, looking quickly between him and the road.

“Unfamiliarity.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his shoulders. “It’s an aura of hostility sort of thing. You get it around a lot of old haunted buildings, especially big ones like hospitals or schools.”

“Not whole towns though,” Michael muttered.

“You get ghost towns,” Alex said. “Centralia’s haunted as fuck, shades get taken there all the time for training.”

“What the hell is Centralia?”

“Abandoned town in Pennsylvania. They actually based Silent Hill on it, I think. The movies, anyway.”

“You been there?”

“Uh huh.”

“Is it like this?”

“No.” Alex frowned and looked out of the window again, squinting at the few people out walking. “It’s…I don’t know, you expect an abandoned town to feel haunted. It _looks_ haunted. This looks normal, mostly. Apart from the shadows, and…I don’t know, this hostile feeling.”

“You’re still clear-headed though? Still remember why we’re here?”

“Yeah.” They turned onto Main Street, and Alex breathed out slowly. “This is very weird.”

“You really weren’t ever planning on coming back, huh?” Michael asked quietly.

“It’s not like I had many happy memories to get nostalgic over.” Alex’s breath caught as they drove past the Crashdown Café.

Michael pushed his hair back from his forehead and gave him a quick look. “You had friends, right?”

“Liz and Maria, and Rosa.” Alex sighed and looked out of the window again. “That kind of blew up when Rosa died, and Liz ran away. And I just sort of…fell out of touch with her and Maria. Maria didn’t even tell me about Mimi going into a care home, and it’s not like I’ve told her about any of the shit going on in my life. I don’t think I even told her about my leg, when that happened. I left everything behind.” Something buzzed in his ear, and he flinched instinctively, hand lashing up to shield himself. “Shit!”

“What?” 

“Nothing.” Alex shook his head. “I mean, not nothing – just a buzz. I guess you don’t get those?”

“Is that the thing where you hear flies?” Michael looked at him, eyes wide.

“More like a wasp or a bee or something. It’s a manifestation of neglect, usually.” Alex made a face. “The first one always makes me jump.”

“Neglect?” Michael frowned at the road. “What’s neglected in Roswell? I mean, I’m sure plenty’s neglected, but town-wide? I’m pretty sure the potholes aren’t what’s haunting the place.”

One of the reasons Alex had been allowed to continue without a partner for so long was because he was perfectly capable of being the brains and brawn of his own operation. A lot of shades in pairs or trios had a member who specialised in research, but Alex could do that himself, and he’d started being able to tell when he was onto something. Neglect was definitely in the right ballpark, he was sure of it.

“Usual process is researching the history of the town,” he murmured as Michael drove them downtown. “But we both know that already.”

“Can a town be haunted by an alien crash most people think was fake?”

“It wasn’t fake though, was it?” Alex looked at him, that gut feeling getting stronger. “And Max and Isobel are real aliens. The history of the crash has to have something to do with it.”

“You know your great-grandfather lead the investigation?”

“Excuse me?” Alex stared at him. “What?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Harlan Manes,” Michael nodded. “Just before the Air Force separated from the Army.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“You think I haven’t researched the crash to death?” Michael snorted. “I bet Grant Green himself doesn’t know more about it than I do.”

“Who?”

“He runs the UFO Emporium now.”

“Right.” Alex winced as another buzz whipped past his ear and started thinking. “What else do you know?”

A lot, as it turned out. Michael gave him the entire history of the crash as he drove out to Sanders’, complete with dates, names of the people involved, and details that only he could provide, like where their pods had been in relation to the crash site and what the ship might have looked like based on the pieces he’d found. 

Sanders’ Auto Salvage was far enough on the outskirts of town for the haunting effects to be minimal, and Alex stepped out of the truck with relief, stretching his legs and rolling his neck. There was a large Airstream parked around the back end of the yard itself, clearly lived in. There were signs and a couple of cow skulls hung on the outside, a huge radio aerial on the roof, and a fire pit set up in front of it with a few mismatched chairs. There was even a little miniature fence around the outside, about two feet tall. “This yours?” Alex asked, intrigued.

“Uh huh.” Michael patted the shell. “But what we’re looking for is underneath.”

“Under…?” Alex backed up a step in shock as the entire trailer moved, sliding away from them to reveal a round manhole cover, or something similar. “What is that?” He followed Michael forward as he walked over to it, and the hatch dropped open inwards with a bang.

“Used to be a fallout shelter, I think. Been using it since I was about fifteen.” Michael glanced at him. “You gonna be okay with the ladder?”

“Yeah.” He’d normally bristle at a question like that, but Michael had kept his tone casual, just inquiring. Michael went down first, and Alex followed carefully. He turned at the bottom as Michael turned on the lights, and stared, making sure not to gape. 

It was bigger and smaller than he’d expected. The light was bad, even with the preponderance of lamps and naked bulbs hanging from the central ceiling panel, and Alex could make a rough guess at what furniture had been here when Michael discovered it and what he’d managed to bring down himself. The metal cubby holes and work tables and the huge lamps must have been here before, but the four giant bell jars probably hadn’t been included in the nuclear fallout preparation kit.

There was something resting on the table to the left, and Alex stared at it, feeling Michael’s eyes on him. It had to be part of the ship; it was too big and weird-looking to be anything else. Faintly purple and dusty-looking, with holes in it like Swiss cheese. Alex turned his attention forward again, looking down at the light table Michael must have adapted himself, covered in drawings. There was a desk against the wall opposite, and more sketches and plans were tacked above it. A table to the right had something on it covered by a cloth. Judging by the trash can tucked underneath it full of takeout wrappers and the half-full bottle of bourbon sitting on the central table, Michael was down here a lot.

“How did you get that down here?” Alex asked, pointing at the gigantic fan tucked in the back right corner, and Michael laughed.

“Seriously? I’m showing you pieces of an actual alien spacecraft, and you wanna know how I got the fan down here?”

“Believe me, the list of questions I have is as long as it is varied,” Alex muttered, doing an exceptional job (in his opinion) of keeping a lid on how freaked out he was. It wasn’t like he was lying about having questions, anyway.

He realised, a couple of questions in, that what he really wanted to ask about was Michael himself. He’d said he, Max, and Isobel had emerged from the desert together, but why had Max and Isobel been adopted separately? He remembered that Michael hadn’t turned up in Roswell until Alex had been eleven or so, so where had he been before then?

But those sorts of questions seemed incredibly personal, and Alex was trying to think of what they were doing as a case, so he asked about where Michael had found the pieces of his spaceship instead, and how he’d figured out what their ship might look like, and what sort of haunting activity he’d dealt with as a shade.

Michael answered all of his questions. It was obvious that he’d never been able to talk to anyone about any of it before, and he repeated things a couple of times, and spoke too fast or too slow, tripping over himself or trying to slow down to explain things properly. It was well into the afternoon by the time Alex had exhausted all of his questions, and they headed back up to get the sandwiches they’d left in Michael’s truck, eating outside in the mismatched chairs.

“Who have you tried talking to already?” Alex asked, getting his phone out to make a list. “Max’s partner, what was her name?”

“Deputy Cameron. Uh, Jenna Cameron. Max calls her Cam, I think.”

“Okay. Anyone else?”

“Uhh, Sheriff Valenti, kinda –”

“Wait, what?” The shock went through him like a jolt of ice. “Jim’s dead.” 

“Sheriff’s a gender-neutral title, man.” Michael had a real way of smiling without actually smiling. His mouth moved, but there was absolutely no warmth or humour in the expression. “His wife’s in charge now. Got reelected last year.”

“Right.” Alex shook his head, breathing out. “Okay.”

“Went to Noah’s offices, got the same weird bullshit from the receptionist there.” Michael tipped his head back, thinking. “I didn’t actually talk to them, but I cased the Evans house, and I know they’re not there. That’s it, I think.”

“You haven’t spoken to Maria?”

Michael frowned at him. “Why would I? None of them are regulars at the Wild Pony.”

“Maria has sensitivity,” Alex pointed out. “She might be feeling the effects of whatever this haunting is.”

Michael shook his head. “Nah, she’s not got it like you do.” He raised his eyebrows when Alex laughed. “What?”

“If anything, she’s more sensitive than I am,” Alex said. “At least on the same level. I might be better now I’ve trained, but Maria used to see _auras_ sometimes when we were kids. She’s sensitive.”

“She keeps that quiet then.” Michael didn’t smile. “She does palm readings for extra cash, but she’s always told me it’s cold reading and gossip and guesswork.”

“She’s sensitive,” Alex said firmly. “She might know something.” 

“You wanna talk to her then?”

That brought Alex up short. “Yeah,” he said, not letting himself second-guess it. It was a good place to start, and he couldn’t let his own history screw up an investigation, even if it was off the books. He had a process. “Ideally not at a busy time. You know her, right? When’s a good time?”

“Now?” Michael looked at him. “Afternoon’s usually quiet, and it’s only a Wednesday.”

“Sure.” If he gave himself time to think things through, he might talk himself out of it. “Let’s go.”

Michael smirked and got to his feet, and Alex did the same before he could offer a hand. He kept getting whiplash, now he had a little distance from last night. Now they were back in Roswell. Michael was the same and different, and Alex was starting to struggle with it, trying to reconcile the connection they still somehow shared with the changed man he was standing in front of. People feeling connected to their firsts he could understand, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this, chasing them for the rest of their lives afterwards.

They got into Michael’s truck, and Alex gripped the side of his seat and breathed in and out slowly, keeping his head turned so Michael couldn’t see him. He didn’t know why he was freaking out so much, and freaking out now, but the creeping sense of disbelief had been rising all day. It had seemed like a dream this morning, and now it was coming up on five in the afternoon and he was in Roswell, sitting in Michael Guerin’s truck – the same truck he’d had since high school – investigating a town-wide haunting.

After he and Michael had had sex four times. After Alex had slept through an entire night. After he’d kissed Michael to the point of familiarity, and felt something loose in him settle when Michael fell asleep against him.

He breathed in on four counts, held for four, and breathed out for four. The further into town they went, the worse he felt, and he concentrated on talking it out so he wouldn’t panic. “You ever heard of daylight darkness?”

“Sure.” Michael glanced at him. “You getting that?” 

“Yeah, a bit.” It was a term for the shadowed feeling people would get in what appeared to be a normal place or situation. Like feeling cold on a hot day, or feeling like it was dark when it was sunny outside. Feeling completely alone in a crowd, or like every noise had a dark significance. “You don’t ever get it?”

“Nope.” Michael sighed. “I don’t even know what kind of distortion it throws up. I don’t share jobs, y’know? I’ve never been able to take someone else along and ask what they’re seeing or feeling when I’m only getting haze.”

“We should experiment a bit.” Alex took a deeper breath and pressed his fingertips against his thumb one at a time, on the hand Michael couldn’t see. Nail into flesh, just to ground him in the present. “This place is overflowing with haunts.”

“You seeing any now?”

Alex dug his fingernails into the palm of his hand and watched a swarm of flies that definitely weren’t corporeal as they buzzed around a patch of ground that looked otherwise unremarkable. The odds that someone had been secretly buried there were very high. “Yeah,” he said tightly. “Lots.” Maybe it would help to list them like he had yesterday. 

“There’s so much distortion it’s hard for me to get anything specific.” Michael sounded disgruntled, and Alex breathed in and out slowly.

“There’s a tree on that corner that isn’t really there.” Out of the corner, he saw Michael nod. “The shadows are too dark, like before. There’s…I can smell smoke again too.” He swallowed. “I feel like I’m being watched, even though I know I’m not.”

“Creepy.”

“Normal. You never get that?”

“Never.”

“Lucky.” And strange. It was like Michael was a plumber who didn’t understand how water worked, or a tailor who didn’t know how to sew. A shade with no sensitivity was a contradiction, it was impossible. 

They fell back into silence, and Alex closed his eyes, focusing on his breathing. The Wild Pony was on the outskirts of the town centre, and there were only a couple of cars parked out front. Michael pulled in with the ease of practice, and Alex caught his arm before he could lead the way in. “I need to talk to her alone,” he said, biting the words out a little.

Michael wasn’t fazed. “Whatever you want. You gonna catch up, I guess?”

“I…guess, yeah.” Alex made himself let go of Michael and took a deep breath. “What do you see around the sign over there?” He jerked his chin towards the big flashing neon sign that had always stood at the entrance to the parking lot. 

“Pretty thick haze,” Michael said, looking over at it, then back at Alex with a frown. “What do you see?”

“Flies. So thick I can barely see the sign.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither.” Alex sighed and looked up at the exterior of the bar, the dark red-brown adobe painfully familiar. “Okay. Come on.”

It was familiar inside as well; a dark space lit up with bright lights. More neon on the walls, fairy lights on some of the rafters and behind the bar, lamps with battered shades in the corners and on a few tables too small to be sat at. Multicoloured bulbs hanging among normal ones, dangling from the rafters in what had to be a fire risk.

Alex realised as he looked around that he couldn’t remember what it had looked like when he was a kid, not exactly. He’d never made a point of fixing it in his mind at the time – it was just the Pony, where Mimi worked and where Maria went after school. The DeLucas’ second home, where they both spent more time than their actual house.

Michael clapped his shoulder and walked forward, grin in place. “Hey DeLuca, guess what?”

The groan from behind the bar was one Alex hadn’t heard in person for over ten years. He stayed by the door, holding onto the railing separating the pool table area from the main floor, and watched as Maria turned around from where she’d been doing something with the cash register. “If what’s about to come outta your mouth doesn’t include the words ‘can pay bar tab’ in some combination, I’m not interested.”

“Aww, don’t be like that.” Michael leaned against the bar and tipped his hat off his head, resting it on the counter surface. “I owe you less than fifty dollars now, right?”

“Forty-eight dollars is hardly something to crow about,” Maria said dryly. Alex couldn’t see her very well from where he was standing, especially not when she was backlit by the blue lights behind the bar. “Beer?”

“Thanks. Your register giving you trouble?” 

“Eh, just playing up.” Maria turned to get him a beer from the cooler and patted the register as she did. “I’ll call you if it breaks again. That’ll knock your debt down some, I guess.”

“By what, twenty dollars?” Michael sounded like a real cowboy, straight and drawling, and Alex made himself take another deep breath, just watching. At school, Alex couldn’t remember if Michael and Maria had ever even spoken to each other, but they were so easy like this it was staggering. Thirteen whole years had passed, and they were all different from the kids they’d once been.

“Don’t tempt fate,” Maria warned, cracking the bottle open and handing it to Michael. “Been at least a week since I’ve seen you in here – you been on another job?”

“Uh huh. Tell you about it later.” Michael glanced over his shoulder, and Alex started to walk forward as Maria followed his gaze. Her jaw dropped when she saw him.

“Alex?”

Michael took his hat and slipped away, and Maria didn’t even notice. She was full-on gaping as Alex closed the distance between them, and he smiled slightly. “Hey, Maria.”

“Alex Manes.” She closed her mouth and shook her head, eyes still wide. “That really you?”

“Three quarters of me.” He could never resist the joke, and something in him lit up when Maria laughed, morbidly delighted, and hurried out from behind the bar.

“Oh my _God, Alex!_” She flung her arms around him, and Alex held on tight. He’d forgotten the few inches between them in height, the way he had to bend down a little to hook his chin over her shoulder. She squeezed him and let go, leaning back to look at him. “God, I can’t believe it. Alex Manes, back in Roswell, in my bar!” She reached up to cup his face with her hands and they just grinned at each other for a long moment, taking each other in.

Alex could feel the hardness of metal against his face where the rings Maria wore pressed against his skin. Her nails were long, and her makeup was flawless, accentuating her beautiful narrow eyes. She was wearing a white collared polo under a black mini dress, and when he leaned back to look, he saw that her legs were bare, and she was wearing battered velvet boots embroidered with leaves. He opened his mouth to tell her she looked good, and found himself saying, “I missed you,” instead.

Maria’s smile creased, and she pulled him in for another hug, swaying them from side to side gently. “I missed you too,” she whispered against his neck. “God, Alex, I can’t believe how long it’s been since you were here.”

“Tell me about it.” Alex laughed when she kissed his cheek, and laughed harder when she punched his shoulder. “Ow, come on, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry! Twelve plus years you’ve been gone!” She shook her head and hugged him again, like she couldn’t help herself. “If you thought you’d be getting free drinks, you’ve got another thing coming.”

He’d forgotten the way she avoided the number thirteen. People had been real dicks to her about it at school. He smiled and kissed her cheek, since she’d kissed his. “Fine by me. I owe you a few rounds anyway.”

“You do,” she agreed emphatically, letting go of him again and stepping back to give him a proper once-over. “You look good!”

“Look who’s talking.” He grinned when she smacked his shoulder again and went back behind the bar. He settled himself in one of the chairs and accepted the beer she handed him. 

“So come on, spill. What’re you doing back in Roswell?” She gave him an expectant look, and he shook his head.

“Tell me about you first. How’ve you been? What’ve I missed?”

“God, what haven’t you missed?” She shook her head and laughed, but there was a rueful edge to it now. “I haven’t done anything. You’re looking at the same person who graduated high school – nothing’s really changed for me at all.”

“Well that’s clearly not true,” Alex scoffed. “You’re old enough to serve now, at least.”

“Smartass.” She shook her head, smiling. “Yeah, I’m behind the bar now, big deal. I run the whole place, actually.”

“What about Mimi?”

“She’s fine with it.” Maria gave nothing away, still smiling so easily that if Alex hadn’t had the story from Michael, he never would have suspected anything. “I was behind the bar on my twenty-first, that’s how fast she wanted me in on the family business. It’s good though – I like it. As for stuff you’ve missed…hmmm. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I got a Business degree at the community college.”

Alex lit up. “That’s great! Holy shit, did you have to do math?”

“Shut up!” She laughed and reached over the bar to shove him gently. “I’m actually way better at that now. Turns out nothing boosts your mental math abilities like having to deal with ten customers at once who all want different things and none of them have exact change.” She rolled her eyes. “What else?”

“You seeing anyone?” Alex prompted.

“Nah.” She wrinkled her nose. “Longest-running contender was a guy I saw for a couple of years.”

“Called?” Alex asked, and grinned when she sighed.

“Chad.”

“Oh, Maria.”

“I know, I know.” She rolled her eyes at herself, smiling. “We all have phases, right?”

“Exactly, and I want to hear all about yours.”

It was a two-way street though, and in the process of finding out some of what had happened in Maria’s life, Alex had to give her a few details about his. He told her about travelling around the world, and not what he’d done once he’d reached his destinations. She told him about almost losing the bar after a health code scare in 2011. He admitted that he hadn’t had a boyfriend. She mused on how much a bartender had to keep to herself in order to stay in the good graces of her customers. 

He’d learned a few words of German, some Arabic, and a few words of Kurdish, and he could curse up a storm at the drop of a hat. She’d learned how to read people so quickly and accurately that she could spot a good tipper from a bad at twenty paces. She knew who was cheating on who and who with. She’d seen the hardest cowboys break down in tears at the end of a hard night, and the sweetest ladies lose their minds with fury and start barfights that destroyed furniture.

They’d had different educations, but Alex was relieved that she was still the Maria he knew. He’d been afraid that Roswell would have stifled her and crushed her vibrancy, making her into one of the small-town harridans who only cared about themselves. He should have known better – Maria DeLuca wasn’t a candle to be snuffed out; she was a blazing fire who lit up the world around her. He felt warmer in her presence, and for the first time in a very, very long time he felt seen for exactly who he was.

Two beers down, he finally admitted, “I’m here on a job.”

“You’re in the shadow business now,” she nodded, pouring a drink for another customer. It had gotten a little busier over the last hour, though still calm enough that she only had to stop talking to him for a minute or two at a time at most when she needed to see to someone else. “What’s the job?”

“Complicated. I’m, uh. Not working it alone.” He tilted his head and flicked his eyes back in the direction of the table Michael had taken a seat at, and he saw Maria raise her eyebrows.

“Guerin? He’s not…I mean, he’s okay, for local riffraff.”

Alex grinned. “Riffraff?”

“Well he did get kinda hot.” She shrugged. “In a sex in a truck, smells like a river, never introduce him to your mama kinda way, y’know?”

Alex took a breath and looked over his shoulder at Michael properly. He was slouched in his chair, phone in hand, and he smirked and lifted his beer when he saw them both looking. Alex turned back to Maria and exhaled. “He kinda did.” Was he really doing this? Maria slipped away to make a cocktail for someone and Alex turned her words over in his mind.

They were obviously friends, or at least friendly. Would Maria judge him for sleeping with Michael? Did he dare tell her that Michael had been the boy who’d kissed him in the museum? He hadn’t asked Michael if he could tell her, and he didn’t imagine he would mind. But was that just wishful thinking? 

He should have checked before they came in. He should be focusing on the job now, not catching up and reminiscing. He tapped the neck of his bottle and ran through his checks. Exit almost directly behind him, fire exit to the left, toilets to the right. Windows barred on the outside. No chill or cold spots, no odd sights, sounds, or smells. A pressing feeling that he was being observed, but less intense than earlier. Michael at his back, Maria to his right, putting cash in the register and sighing when it refused to close until she slammed it shut.

“I’m back,” she said a second later, coming to stand in front of Alex again and smiling. “Where were we?”

“Don’t remember.” He ran his tongue between his lips and bit the bullet. “You know the Evans twins?”

Maria shrugged. “Sure. Max the depressed deputy, Isobel the ice queen.”

“And her husband?”

“Oh, he’s a trophy for her. Comes in more than either of them though – his law firm helps out on Ranchero Night.”

“A law firm helps out on Ranchero Night?” Alex raised his eyebrows and Maria laughed.

“I know, but they’re actually really good. They offer free legal advice to the ones who need it.”

“Wow. Okay, yeah, that is good.”

“Right?” She cocked her head to one side. “So, what about the twins?”

“You seen them around lately? I was hoping to catch up with Max too, and I know they always went round as a pair.”

“Not so much these days.” Maria shrugged. “I don’t know, I haven’t seen them around. Like I said, they don’t really come in here.”

Alex nodded. “You still sensitive like when we were kids?”

Maria gave him a look he’d never seen on her before. Assessing, almost calculating. Far more serious than she’d been with him so far. “I can tell something’s off,” she said at last, quieter than before. “I don’t feel it in here so much, but I feel it on my way in and out. It started last week, Friday.” The day Michael had gotten back to Roswell. “You want Guerin over for this?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if we shouldn’t wait for you to be free though.”

“I take a break at seven, before it starts getting really busy.” She cast a look over Alex’s shoulder. “I wanna know – is this an official job for you?”

Alex huffed. “No. Guerin came and found me.”

“Came and found you?” Maria leaned back, one hand on her hip. “You’re telling me you and Michael Guerin have been in contact this whole time?”

“No.” He laughed. “No, definitely not. Yesterday was the first time I’d heard from him since we graduated.”

“Okay, that makes me feel better.” She touched her heart, pretending relief. “If I’d found out you’d been keeping up a long-distance friendship with _Guerin_ of all people, I’d be really offended.”

“I dropped everyone equally, don’t worry.” Alex gave her a sad sort of smile. “I haven’t spoken to Liz in years.”

“Yeah, well, me neither.” Maria sighed. “We were okay to begin with, but you know how it goes. Longer and longer between messages, and then nothing at all. I don’t even know where she’s living now – she doesn’t even have an Instagram I can follow. But neither do you, so.”

“Technically I live in my van,” Alex said dryly. “Being a shade is a very glamourous job.”

“Ugh.” Maria made a face. “What do you do when you have vacation time?”

“Vacation time?” Alex blinked and put his hand to his ear. “Sorry, say that again? I can’t quite understand you. Vacation? Time? What are these concepts?”

She laughed. “Boy, do I know what you mean.” He heard a group of men enter and saw her check them out. “Ahh, here come the cavalry. Remember Wyatt Long?” She lowered her voice, and Alex tried to get a picture of the group coming up behind him in the mirror behind the bar. 

“I remember.”

“He’s still a racist asshole, and now he has a _posse_.” She rolled her eyes and got another couple of beers out from behind the bar. “Go sit with Guerin, come find me when I take my break, alright?”

“Sure. Thanks, Maria.”

“Always.” She smiled at him, then cranked that smile up and turned it on the man who shouldered against the bar to Alex’s left. “Gentlemen. The usual?”

Alex took the beers and retreated to Michael’s table. “Sorry,” he said as he sat down. “I didn’t mean to spend so long catching up.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Michael’s smile was easy, amused. Alex didn’t know if he would have been as patient in his shoes, and he shook his head.

“No, I should’ve been focusing on the job.”

“Relax, shade. I’m not gonna hold it against you.”

Alex shook his head and took a sip of his beer. “You’re as much a shade as I am, you know.”

“Not according to the government,” Michael drawled. “No licence, no bueno.”

Alex snorted. “Do you at least have a fake licence to flash people if you need to?”

“Nah. I don’t have any speciality equipment that’d get me in trouble if I was searched, so there never seemed much point.”

“You don’t need the kit at all, right?” Alex frowned at him. “So why the protection charms?” He nodded to Michael’s hat, lying next to him on the table.

“They were presents.” Michael smiled slightly and touched the charm on the inside of the hat. “This one’s from a lady I helped a couple years back. The sagebrush was from Isobel.”

“The belt buckle?”

“Isobel again. She thinks it’s funny, what I do.”

“What about Max and Noah?”

“Max disapproves.” Michael shrugged, and Alex wondered if he was imagining the little flash of hurt in his expression. “But he’s a lawman, so he kinda has to. Noah…I don’t know. I think he worries a little bit.” He smiled slightly. “He doesn’t know it’s no risk for me.”

“When did he and Isobel get married?”

“Few years ago. They met when she was twenty-four, got married a couple years later. They’ve got a really good life together, they’re happy.” A shadow passed over Michael’s face, and Alex nudged his foot under the table.

“We’ll find them.”

Michael nodded and lifted his beer to his lips. “What you tell her?” he asked before taking a gulp.

“Nothing big yet.” Alex looked over his shoulder at the bar, which had gotten busy fast. He thought he maybe recognised a couple of the guys, but couldn’t be entirely sure. Maria was smiling and laughing with them as she poured drinks and took cash and card payments, every move natural and practiced. Queen of her little realm. “She said Noah comes in more than the Evans twins.”

“Really?”

“Apparently his law firm helps out on Ranchero Night.”

“Huh.” Michael, when Alex looked back at him, was frowning. “I’ve never seen him.”

“You come here every night?”

“Support your local bars, right?” Michael said, quick as a whip. “Support local businesses. Nothin’ wrong with being a regular.”

“Never said there was.”

“Mm.” Michael took another drink, still prickly. “Well. I’m here often enough. Never seen Noah in here, and he’s never mentioned it to me.”

“You think she’s lying?” Alex asked sceptically, but Michael shook his head. 

“Nah. I don’t know, just feels like a puzzle piece.”

“Or a red herring. Unless you think your brother in law’s a zombie.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “I’ll stick to reality for now, thanks.”

“Says the alien,” Alex couldn’t resist muttering, and wasn’t sure for a heartstopping moment whether he’d overstepped the mark. But then Michael snorted.

“Very funny. What else you tell her?”

“Asked if she’d felt anything weird. She said this stuff kicked off on Friday, just before you got back.”

“So she’s feeling something?” Michael straightened, eyes wide.

“Told you she’s sensitive.” Alex wanted to kick him under the table again, wanted to press their feet together like last night. He pulled his foot back instead, out of the way and out of temptation’s reach. “Said she doesn’t feel it so much in here, and I’m not either. What about you?”

“Nah. There’s always a little fuzz by the fire exit, and a bit more in the parking lot. I’ve cleared it a few times before, but it always comes back eventually.”

Alex frowned. “Fuzz, is that smaller than haze?”

“Yeah.”

“We need to figure out a referencing system we both understand. Sooner rather than later.”

“We can take a drive after this, if you like.” Michael was giving him a look that was sending dangerous heat sparking through Alex’s body. “Find some ghosts, get a rating for them.”

“Sounds good,” Alex made himself say, and wished he didn’t feel so on edge. It was the men at the bar, he realised. The noise and swagger and brawn of them. And something else too. He frowned and concentrated, going still.

“Alex?”

“Gimme a second.”

This threatening feeling was different to the one Alex was used to feeling for when he was in situations that could turn ugly. Different but not. Similar-strange was how his mentor had put it when he’d been training. A feeling you recognised, but twisted by something unnatural.

The threat of violence was something he had a very, very solid measure of. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed in, and out. He listened to the braying group, and heard an echo of bones snapping behind their words, and beyond that –

“There’s something riding one of them,” he muttered, opening his eyes and reaching for his beer. “Can you see it?”

Michael blinked, then frowned at the group. “No. Wait…yeah, maybe. Yeah, shit, on Owens.”

“Wayne Owens?”

“Uh huh.”

Wayne Owens, once their high school’s star middle linebacker and one of Kyle Valenti’s best friends. Brawn to Kyle’s brain. Alex had vivid memories of Wayne Owens cornering him around the side of the music block after school one day with his friend Joey Lopez and – 

The group of men laughed and headed over to the pool tables, and Alex breathed out, watching them go. “What does it look like for you?”

“Doesn’t look like anything, but I can hear it, now I’m listening for it. His voice sounds fucked.” Michael made a face and reached for his own bottle. “I can hear it when someone’s being influenced like that. They sound like…well, different.”

“Like a different person?”

“Nah, like…it changes.” Michael pursed his lips, and Alex looked quickly away from them. “It’ll sound echoey, maybe, or layered, like there’s five people speaking outta the same voicebox, or kinda metallic or distorted, like they’re speaking into a bad mic, or like they’re using a voice changer.”

“That’s…” Weird as fuck. “Useful, that you can hear it like that.”

“Has been in the past,” Michael agreed, and looked at him with interest. “How do you pick it up? Not by looking at him, right?”

“No.” Alex took another drink while he tried to figure out how to put it into words. “I sort of let myself sit still and just listen,” he said finally. “Most of the time it’s just about paying attention to the part of your brain that can tell something’s wrong.”

“But what was it about him specifically?”

Alex glanced over at the pool tables, where Wayne Owens was leaning against the wall, chatting to two of the other men while one of their friends set the table up and another chalked his cue. He didn’t want to tell Michael that he had a sense memory of Wayne’s violence, having experienced it up close and personal on several occasions. He definitely didn’t want to tell him that he had memories of the fear that accompanied it, the sick certainty of being outnumbered and outgunned and trapped, knowing that pain and humiliation were coming and not knowing when or if it would stop.

“The similar-strange,” he said eventually. “You ever heard of that?” Michael shook his head and gestured for him to explain. “Same as daylight darkness, really. It’s when you get lost in a place you know like the back of your hand. Or you look up at the ceiling of your house and see a pattern in the paint you’d never noticed before, and you wonder whether it’s always been there, or if it just appeared. I know what guys like that sound like.” He tilted his head in the direction of the pool tables. “I can tell something about them isn’t right. Whatever’s riding Wayne is affecting all of them, and it’s giving them sharper edges.”

“What d’you mean?”

“They’re gonna want to kill someone by the end of the night,” Alex said bluntly. “They’re gonna be a wolf pack. Whatever the thing is in Wayne is gonna rile them up and get them so bloodthirsty they’ll be foaming at the mouth for someone to take it out on.” Someone like him. “Someone easy and weak.”

Michael looked more than a little freaked out. “How the hell can you know that?”

“Seen it before. It’ll be the ghost of a victim or a perpetrator, I’d bet money on it.” He cleared his throat. “Maria said she’s got a break at seven, and we can talk to her privately then.”

Michael nodded and checked the time on his phone. “I’ll be right back.” He left his beer on the table and headed to the restroom, and Alex sat back in his chair and tried to be unnoticeable. Normally, he wouldn’t have cared, but whatever was riding Wayne was putting him on edge. It was getting stronger too – he could hear it in the men’s raised voices, in the number of curses they were spitting out, in the whistles they gave a woman unlucky enough to walk past.

The noise level of the whole bar had gone up, and they were forcing it higher. Alex could hear snapping bones in the echo of Wayne’s booming laughter. He could remember Wayne and Joey calling him a faggot, Wayne’s grip on his wrists like iron, his own cracked gasps of pain as Joey punched his stomach so hard he retched.

This fucking town.

The hatred of it rolled over him like a wave, dragging him under so fast his head spun. Fucking Roswell. Hellhole of New Mexico, alien bullshit on every fucking street, homophobic bullies in every fucking corner. No escape, ever. Fucking _Roswell,_ a dead end backwater shitstain of a town overpopulated with scumbags like Wayne fucking Owens and Wyatt fucking Long and Kyle _fucking_ Valenti, wherever the fuck he was. Assholes who turned on you the second there might be something in it for them. Rat bastard pieces of shit who would do anything to climb a little higher on the piss-stained rotten steps that counted as a social ladder in this diseased, parasitic hole that called itself a town.

Even Michael hadn’t been able to escape. And Michael…Alex watched, incredulous, as Michael came out of the bathroom and headed straight for the pool tables, cowboy swagger all the way, grin in place. He slapped the shoulder of a guy with shoulder-length blonde hair and grinned at Wayne like they were old friends, and wasn’t that just fucking typical? It was fine for Michael. He could blend in; he’d never carried that distinct _difference_ about him the way Alex had. Michael leaned in to say something to Wayne, and Alex ducked his head, fuming.

Michael Guerin had been a loner, but at least no one had targeted him the way they’d targeted Alex. Wayne never would have held his arms behind his back so Joey Lopez could punch him till he threw up. Guerin hadn’t been worth the attention. He’d flown under the radar – he was good at that. Well, it was alright for some, wasn’t it?

Alex heard something rattle and realised that he was clutching his beer bottle so hard it was trembling against the table. It would be so satisfying to drain it, smash the bottom off, and show Guerin and his new buddies what real pain was. Let them – 

“Alex?” 

Michael was back, and Alex let go of the bottle, clenching his jaw and reaching for the hat Michael had left on the table. He didn’t fully understand what he was doing until his fingers brushed the little paper packet. “How do I sound?” he asked, lips twisting against the desire to grin, the paper burning like hot metal against his fingertips.

“Distorted as fuck.” Michael grabbed both his wrists, and Alex felt the wrongness of everything that had just passed through his mind very suddenly, the twisting, sneering darkness gone as though it had never been. “What the hell was that?” Michael whispered. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Alex flexed his fingers, and Michael let go abruptly, sinking into his chair. “Wow. Haven’t been pushed like that in a while.”

“Pushed?” Michael was staring at him, and Alex dredged up a casual smile, pretending he didn’t want to flee the building and maybe have a tiny panic attack outside in the parking lot. Maybe a long, burning shower to wash off the aftereffects of being ghost-ridden. Maybe leave this whole town in his rear-view mirror and never come back again. 

“No big deal. Something just got in my head for a second there. Similar to whatever’s riding Wayne.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not riding him anymore.” Michael looked over at the pool tables, and Alex followed his gaze with a frown, concentrating.

“What did you do?” he asked, trying and failing to sense the violence he’d felt before.

“Magic hands.” Michael wiggled the fingers of his good hand. “Get me close enough, I can clear up anything. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah.” Alex flexed his fingers again, then reached for his bottle and took three large gulps. He really hadn’t been influenced like that in a long while, and never that fast. He wore a silver chain for protection against that sort of thing, but it was either worn down or needed replacing entirely if it was letting shit like that through. “It’s nearly seven, right?”

“Yeah, five to.” Michael picked up his beer. “Maria takes a smoke break outside, we can find her there.”

“She still smokes?”

“Down to just a couple a day, she says, unless she’s stressed.” Michael smiled at him. “Did you miss her?”

Alex shook his head and reached for his beer again. “More than I realised.”

“She’s pretty great.”

“Yeah. Are you two good friends now?”

“Wouldn’t say that.” Michael gulped beer and looked over at the bar. “It’s kinda like school, y’know? You sit next to someone in the same class for ten years, you’re gonna get to know them a bit, even if you don’t really mean to. I don’t know her thoughts and dreams, but I know how to sweettalk her into extending my tab.” He grinned. “And I fix anything round here that needs fixing. Which, granted, is sometimes because I broke it, but she hasn’t banned me yet.”

“What’re you breaking around here?” 

“Tables and chairs, mostly. The occasional pool cue.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “You get in a lot of fights?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

Alex nodded slowly, filing that information away with a creeping feeling of distaste. “Maria’s gonna want to know how we know each other,” he made himself say, looking down at the table between them.

“Tell her whatever you want,” Michael said immediately. “Makes no difference to me.”

Alex couldn’t tell if Michael was giving him permission to tell Maria about their high school thing, or if he was giving Alex an out to tell her nothing. He couldn’t figure out how to ask for clarification before Michael was standing, settling his hat on his head. “She’s out. Let’s go, shade.”

Alex rolled his eyes and brought his beer with him. They went out the fire exit, which was propped open to let some air in, and Michael led the way round the back. A big flashing sign was mounted on the roof, advertising live music, and a sign advertising cocktails was pinned to the wall underneath. Maria was leaning against the wall under that, the red and green neon lights giving her hair a halo in the dusk as she cupped her hand around her cigarette to light it.

“Boys,” she said, grinning when she saw them. “That was quick.”

Alex could hear crows gathering in the straggly tree that stood in the parking lot, but when he looked over saw nothing but blurry shadows. “We’re kind of on the clock,” he said, coming to lean against the wall next to Maria. She offered him the cigarette, and he shook his head.

“None for me, DeLuca?” Michael slouched on her other side. “I’m hurt.”

“Forty-eight dollars,” she reminded him pleasantly. “Besides, I see you almost every day. I haven’t seen Alex in over a decade. But we’ve done our reminiscing for now.” She nudged him companiably and took a long drag. “Tell me what shadowy business you guys are up to.” Smoke curled in the warm air as she spoke, and Alex looked across her at Michael, who sighed and took his hat off so he could tip his head back against the adobe.

“Something happened while I was away,” he said. “Maybe on Thursday night, if that’s when you noticed it. You’re the only person who’s noticed so far. What would you say if I told you Max, Isobel, and Noah were missing?”

Maria frowned at him. “I’d say you’d know better than me. Are they?”

“They are.” Michael turned his hat around in his hands. “Alex told you that already, right?”

“Yeah?”

“And you remember it?”

Maria narrowed her eyes. “My memory is fine, Guerin.” 

Michael lifted his hands in surrender. “Listen, I’m just checking, okay? I’ve asked Max’s partner and a bunch of other people who know them, and none of them think anything’s wrong. It’s like they don’t even understand Max and Isobel are missing, and this whole town’s suddenly haunted like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Stuff I can’t banish, stuff that won’t stay down. I need to figure out what happened, and I need to get Max, Iz, and Noah back.”

“Sounds like a real quest.” Maria didn’t stop frowning, but she didn’t sound like she didn’t believe him either. “What’s it got to do with me?”

“I wondered if you were still as sensitive as you were when we were kids,” Alex said, and she turned towards him, exhaling out of the corner of her mouth so the smoke wouldn’t blow in his face. “It’s a town-wide haunting. The more help we have, the better.”

“Hm.” She sucked in another lungful and exhaled it slowly, looking out over the parking lot. “I don’t really do that stuff now.”

Alex nodded. “Okay, I understand –”

“My mom…” Maria touched one of the necklaces she was wearing. “I don’t know if you remember, she gave me this at graduation.”

He didn’t, but Alex nodded, looking at it. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s charmed.” She rubbed her thumb over the teardrop of glass. “For protection, for our family specifically. I can tell it’s been working overtime this last week.” She glanced at Michael. “I can tell you did something to Wayne, to calm him down. Shit like that’s been happening all week too. Two kids have gone missing, did you know that? And someone set fire to Carly Martinez’s food truck. I’ve been smelling smoke outside the last few days, but it doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.”

“I’ve been getting that,” Alex nodded, and tilted his head in the direction of the tree. “Something’s clinging over there too, and there were flies all over your main sign when we got here.”

“It’s coming closer,” Michael muttered, and Alex realised that it was. The warm pink-blue sky seemed cold and remote, all of a sudden, and the cicadas had stopped. The silence was oppressive, the light breeze through the tree only emphasising how quiet it was, and as Alex watched, the shadows under the trucks and cars darkened to pitch black, and they started to grow, stretching towards them without a sound.

“Oh, cool.” Maria sighed. “We’d better head back inside. There’s protection charms in the walls, nothing’s getting inside the Pony.” Casual as anything, she turned and headed back in through the staff entrance, and after a moment’s hesitation, Alex and Michael followed her.

The Wild Pony’s kitchen was a small room with stainless steel everything. Maria was at the sink, pouring water over her cigarette to put it out before she put the butt in the trash. “That’s been happening more often too,” she said, as if nothing was wrong. “I don’t know what the hell’s been going on in my parking lot, but it’s obviously left some marks.”

“When you say more often, do you mean just this week?” Alex asked.

“Yeah. Well.” She shrugged. “I get little flickers every now and then, but nothing like that. Nothing powerful enough to put the lights out. I’m still not clear on what you guys think I can help you with, other than confirming what you can already see.”

What one of them could see, anyway. Alex sighed. “For a normal job, I’d dig into the history of the place and walk it over to get a feel for the depth of the problem. The biggest place I’ve ever had to go over was an abandoned hotel, and that was with three other shades, all of us working as a team. This is an entire town, and you and Michael know it much better than I do these days. To figure out the problem, we need to figure out if there’s a nexus, and where it is if there is one.”

“So you want me to walk all over town with you?” Maria frowned. “And just see what jumps out?”

“Pretty much. I’ll pay you,” Alex offered. “Standard shade’s rates. We’re allowed to ask for assistance from members of the public and compensate them.”

Behind Maria, Michael raised his eyebrows, and Alex studiously ignored him. Maria smiled and shook her head. “Consider it a favour. The bar doesn’t open till three most days, so I can play ghosthunting with you till then.”

“You sure?”

“Like it’ll be a hardship to hang out with one of my best friends?” She smiled, and Alex’s heart skipped a beat at being described that way. He smiled back, hoping it wasn’t as wobbly as it felt, and obviously failed because she made a soft tutting noise and pulled him into a tight hug. “I missed you.”

He closed his eyes for a second to avoid Michael’s gaze, and only let go when she did. “You haven’t moved, right?”

“Hell no.” She touched his cheek, her smile soft. “You gonna come and pick me up?”

“Yeah. We could get breakfast?”

“I’ll make you breakfast,” she declared. “Come over at nine and I’ll have everything ready.”

He nodded. “Sounds perfect.”

“Good. You guys sticking around to clutter up my bar?” 

“Name me a better place to spend our time and money on a Wednesday night,” Michael drawled. “It’s not even late, DeLuca. You kickin’ us out so soon?”

“Well I don’t know about you, but I’ll probably want to eat a real meal at some point tonight,” Alex said dryly.

“Don’t worry,” Michael smirked. “I know all the best places.”

Maria snorted, and Alex breathed through the sudden jolt of fear that went through him at the prospect of eating out with Michael. “Best junk places, maybe. What’s your idea of a decent meal, Guerin? Betty’s barbeque?” 

“Oh I know you’re not taking aim at Betty.” Michael shook his head, teasing. “Best brisket in town, and that’s the truth.”

“You’re a lost cause.” Maria shook her head and squeezed Alex’s upper arm, bringing his attention back to her. “You’re not living on takeout and gas station snacks, I can tell.”

Alex shrugged, smiling slightly. “Hard not to when you’re living out of motels most of the year. I eat a lot of fruit to try and balance it out.” 

Maria snorted and tapped his shoulder in fake admonishment. “I’d better get back out there. You go out and come in round the front, I don’t want people getting ideas.”

“Wouldn’t want people to think you’ve got a heart,” Michael agreed, dry and amused. “C’mon, shade.” He gripped Alex’s other shoulder for a second as he passed him, and Alex swayed after him without meaning to. He gave Maria one last smile before following Michael out.

The parking lot had returned to normal while they’d been inside, but Alex and Michael both stood there quietly for a moment. The cicadas were singing again, and the sky no longer seemed alien and forbidding. “You see anything?” Michael asked in a low voice.

Alex shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Me neither. I can hear it though.”

“Yeah?”

“Same sorta pitch as the cicadas, but steadier. And, y’know. Not normal.”

“Spookier?” Alex raised an eyebrow, and his lips quirked when Michael gave him an exasperated look.

“Come on, let’s go back inside. You want another drink?”

“Sure.”

“Buy me one too then, since you can apparently afford to ‘compensate’ civilian help.”

Alex snorted and followed him around the side of the building, casting one last look over his shoulder at the tree in the parking lot. There wasn’t a single shadow in it, and he couldn’t hear any cawing birds.

They sat at a different, smaller table when they went back inside, and the feeling of being watched increased as they drank, putting Alex on guard. Michael didn’t mention hearing or seeing anything, and Alex didn’t want to bring it up. Even though Michael had taken care of whatever had been riding Wayne, Alex still tensed whenever the group of men he was with laughed too loud. He went to say goodbye to Maria before they left, and wished he was brave enough to tug her back outside and tell her all his secrets, like he had when they were kids. He wanted her advice. He needed someone to tell him what to do. 

Because he was still following Michael around, and starting to hate himself for it. He was a grown man, for God’s sake, and a licenced shade. He shouldn’t be trailing Michael Guerin like a lost puppy. So when Michael shrugged his arms wide at the roadside and asked, “So where d’you wanna go for food?” Alex turned away.

“Any takeout’s good with me. I should probably get a room somewhere and turn in soon anyway.”

He didn’t really know what he was expecting in response, but it certainly wasn’t for Michael to touch his arm. Alex flinched away, and then had to see the surprise in Michael’s face chased by hurt, then that humourless smirk Alex was beginning to hate. “Right,” he said flatly. “Yeah, sure. I’ve heard the Belmont’s okay, for the price. We passed it on the way into town this morning. Or there’re the nicer places up by the golf course.”

He’d fucked up. Alex ran his tongue over his lower lip and turned to face Michael again. “Guerin –”

“It’s fine, I get it.” Michael’s mouth twisted. “It’s not so far from there to the junkyard, and you know your way around. Can’t erase sixteen years of memories that easy, right? I can drive you if you want.”

“It’s fine.” Alex felt numb, and his skin was prickling as if there was a silent crowd around them, staring and judging. He had to fight the instinct to lower his voice in response to it. “Like you said, I know my way.”

“See you tomorrow then.” Michael tipped his chin up in a sort of nod, stepping backwards towards where he’d parked his truck. “Swing by when you want me.” He’d turned before Alex could think of anything to say, and he stood back from the entrance to the parking lot when Michael drove up, looking down at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “Your bag’s still in the back,” he said casually. “Unless you wanna sleep in your clothes?”

Alex had forgotten. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten, and he bristled in response to Michael’s tone. “My hero.” He reached over the side of the truck bed and pushed the tarp in the back aside to grab his duffel bag and his crutches. “See you tomorrow.” 

Michael touched the brim of his hat and barely waited for Alex to step back before driving off. It had happened so fast, Alex didn’t even know what he’d said to piss Michael off. Unless he’d wanted Alex to come back to his trailer and spend another night with him that badly?

Prospects for sleeping with men had to be pretty thin on the ground in Roswell, Alex rationalised, breathing through a growing ache in his chest. But if that was how Michael reacted to being turned down these days, maybe he’d dodged a bullet. He swallowed and slug his bag over his shoulder, getting his phone out to call an uber. 

He could have walked, sure, but even if he hadn’t been reluctant to push his luck with his leg when he was already feeling so stressed, the neon sign for the Wild Pony was still covered in incorporeal flies, the buzzing wavering between faint and practically demonic. Until he knew what was going on in Roswell, he was in no hurry to be walking around outside on his own in the dark.


	3. Thursday 26th August 2021

After waking up from his third nightmare at half four in the morning, Alex decided that he’d had enough sleep. He typed the remnants of what he remembered from the dream into his phone and got up to take a shower. One of the benefits of staying in one of Roswell’s cheaper motels was the relative lack of alien-themed kitsch in his room. The plug-in air freshener was in the shape of an alien’s head, but that was about it. They had a veteran’s discount too, so he’d paid for the room for a week, just to be on the safe side.

It was still dark outside, but there was a diner just down the road that he was pretty sure opened at five. The air outside was mild and dry, the sky such a familiar shade of blue that Alex stood still and stared for almost an entire minute. He could see a few stars, and the distant ragged wisps of clouds floating high above, so still that they seemed to be fixed in place against the world’s ceiling. 

The closest he’d worked to Roswell in the last couple of years was in Capitan, in the mountains just to the west. He’d been waking up under the southwestern sky for long enough now that he ought to have been used to it, but somehow it was different in Roswell. Alex closed his eyes and sighed. 

_ZzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZ_

Right past his ear, so close that Alex stumbled away and almost fell over. “Fuck!” He steadied himself, heart racing. “Jesus.” No visuals, and the buzz had vanished, but he touched his ear all the same. It had been a low, angry buzz, like a hornet or a tarantula hawk, not a simple fly. He shuddered, suddenly freezing cold, and went back inside. He was starving, sure, but he wasn’t hungry enough to go outside when something was so clearly warning him off. Not without a bit more protection, at any rate. He was too close to the town centre.

He’d packed the essentials for this trip, and he sorted them out back in his room, trying to decide which would be the best defence against whatever the fuck was happening in Roswell.

He turned his t-shirt inside out first. It was pretty low-level protection, but it was inconspicuous as long as the label wasn’t visible, and the day a shade forgot to cover the basics was the day a shade died.

Salt in his shoes was next, and then iron rings around his ankles and wrists. He wondered whether protection oil on his fingernails was a bit much for a second, then snorted to himself and applied it. Between his nightmares, being ghost-ridden in the Wild Pony yesterday, and the buzz outside just now, he wasn’t taking chances. 

The weight of the metal on his wrists was reassuring when he went outside again. The smell of smoke was still faintly present, and the streetlamps would occasionally flicker, but Alex walked on slowly down the road.

The first haunt he’d ever experienced had been in Roswell. He couldn’t remember how old he’d been, but it been before his mother left, so he couldn’t have started school yet. He’d been at the park near their house, and Flint, Hunter, and Marcus had left him behind. Forgotten or on purpose, he didn’t know. It had gotten dark, and he’d been sat on the bleachers by the ballfield, waiting. Just waiting, as if anyone would come and get him.

There was a set of swings outside the ballpark, not far from the bleachers. It must have been summer – he’d been wearing shorts and a t-shirt, no jacket – and the dusk had been mild. So he’d noticed when two of the swings started swinging by themselves. He hadn’t done anything, just watched and waited, both scared and amazed.

He didn’t remember what had happened next, really. He supposed they’d stopped, and he’d run home. 

The park wasn’t far from here. He paused at a crossing and looked down the road stretching away to his right. Turn here, and he could walk straight there. He’d walk past his old street on the way.

Trepidation slid into fear as he imagined going back to his childhood home. His dad probably still lived there. 

Alex scowled and turned right, clenching his hands into fists in his pockets. The sky overhead had lightened a little, but dawn still had to be an hour off, at least. He had salt in his shoes and iron on his wrists. He’d survived this long: he could handle walking past his old street in the dark.

As on-edge as he was, Alex was aware of every patch of wrongness he passed on his way down to the park. The sound of sobbing echoed from an empty shed in someone’s yard. The tree on the corner of Alameda was covered in deep pink-red blossoms that smelled sickly sweet, even though spring was months gone. There was a cold spot at the bus stop so intense that Alex found himself shivering even after he’d walked through it. He spotted something approaching from down the road and stopped, waiting as a large, animal shape ran steadily towards him. It resolved itself into a pitch-black horse, blurry at the edges, and completely silent. Its eyes glowed white, and Alex held his breath until it had run by him, and waited an extra minute to be sure before walking on. He didn’t look back.

It was like he was dreaming. He’d never seen so many different ghosts overlaying each other so thickly in one place, and that feeling of unfamiliarity was pressing at him again, the wrongness of it making him feel slightly drunk, a little lightheaded. This was his neighbourhood. He knew it, or had known it, better than the back of his hand. But it felt like he was walking on an alien planet now, the strangeness lapping at him in waves.

Stiles Park looked almost exactly the same as it had when he’d been a kid. There were painted railings to stop people driving over the grass, and the sign had been replaced at some point over the last decade, but everything else was identical. Alex crossed the road to walk next to the chain-link fence, raking his eyes over the scrubby grass, the goalposts, the brick hut where the sports equipment was kept.

He walked past the ballpark and stared at the bleachers, and only allowed himself to look over at the swing set once he was past the fence, where the sidewalk ended. It was the same set, though he thought it might be painted different colours – it was hard to tell in the dark. Six swings, all at different heights because of the way people had swung them up and over the bar, wrapping the chains around it.

As he watched, the swing on the end started to move. “There you are,” he muttered. He stayed where he was, not letting himself get too focused on it as it started to swing properly. Something nudged the back of his good leg, and he breathed out slowly. “You’re up early.”

The echo of laughter drifted over the field, and the streetlamp nearest to him fizzed and sputtered.

Not all haunts were malicious. In many cases, they were just unsettling, and it was a rare person who was content to live alongside something that would scare them, even if it had no intention of doing so. But Alex had been called out before to help people communicate with the ghosts they’d discovered. Most of the time, the job ended in a routine banishment, but every now and then the client just wanted to find out what had happened, and how they could accommodate their ghost.

Sometimes, hauntings were completely benign. Alex suspected this was one of them. He couldn’t be a hundred percent certain, but he guessed it was a category 6-d. Incorporeal and tied to a location, interacting in a mild physical way with the environment around it. The sort of haunting people often didn’t bother to call licenced shades out for. They’d try to deal with it themselves, or get a local like Mimi or Michael to handle it, if they noticed it at all.

That time when he was a kid, abandoned by his brothers at the park, hadn’t been the last time he’d seen the swing ghost. All it had ever done was move the swings, never more than one or two at a time. The laughter was new. The nudging – and there it was again, like a child pushing at the backs of his legs – was new. It upgraded this ghost from 6-d to 6-c right away, which was interesting.

“You want me to come over?” Alex asked, testing. Some ghosts were aware of their surroundings, but many weren’t. He’d assumed the swing haunt to just be a remnant – the psychic imprint of generations of small children pressing their giddy joy into the swing set, maybe anchored by the stronger emotional reaction of a few sensitive kids over the years. Remnants were like recordings, playing their haunts through over and over until they exhausted themselves and went dormant, then building up until they could start again.

The nudge pushed again at the backs of his thighs, very weak, and he took a step forward. “Okay, I’m coming.”

He walked over very slowly, senses on high alert for the slightest change. But all that happened was that the rest of the swings all began to move as well, dancing back and forth jerkily in the dim light. “Where should I sit?” Alex asked when he was close enough, and the swing second from the end went abruptly still. “Thank you.”

The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end, and the feeling of being watched was rising. But Alex rested a hand on the chain of the swing and sat down slowly all the same. He’d had plenty of experience by now of keeping his cool while the natural reactions of his body and brain screamed at him to run. The supernatural triggered the same primal instinct in the human brain as seeing a predator in the wild. The most common reactions were freeze and flee, followed by fight in a very small minority. No one with any sense tried to reason with a hungry tiger, but that was exactly what shades were trained to do.

“What should I do?” he asked the empty air around him, pretending to himself and the ghost that he wasn’t scared at all. “Do you want me to swing too?”

More laughter, shrieking and excited, and the swings around him jumped higher in the air. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he murmured, and pushed himself backwards and forwards very gently, keeping both feet on the ground. 

“Higher!” Something shouted it right next to his ear, and Alex breathed through the instinct to run away. If he’d had his phone or some other device out to record what was happening, it wouldn’t have picked anything up, except perhaps static. He gripped the chains a little tighter and pushed himself back properly, lifting his feet off the ground on the downswing.

“Is that better?” he asked, and the swings around him jangled, the laughter multiplying on itself until it sounded like there were at least half a dozen children there with him. Finally, under the fear, he felt a trickle of amusement. “Are you having fun?” he heard himself ask, and cracked a smile when several children’s voices chorused a silent, “Yes!” back at him.

He could feel the urge to let go completely pushing at him, the ghost’s influence trying to get him to lose himself in the action of kicking himself back and tucking his legs under, feeling the swoop in his stomach and the air on his face. The closest any child would get to flying. He had no idea when the last time he’d sat on a swing set had been. It was very possible that this was the last one he’d used, however many years ago. 

He kept his movements reigned in and under control. “Can you understand me?” he asked. Nothing but laughter answered him. “Is there something you want?”

“Higher!” cried a child’s voice.

“Anything else?”

“Higher!”

No, then.

Alex stayed for a while longer, until the streetlamps turned off because of their timers, not because of supernatural influence. The sky was lightening, the still scraps of cloud turning pink around the edges in the east. He slowed down his swinging until he was sitting still, and pulled himself to his feet. “Thank you for having me,” he said, hoping to mitigate any potential ill feeling the ghost might have to his leaving. “It’s been fun.”

There was a giggle, and the swing he’d just left started to move, hitting him in the back of his calves. He snorted and stumbled forward. “Very funny. Have a nice day.” 

It was almost half six, according to his watch, and Roswell was waking up. It had been a long time since he’d had such a pleasant experience with a haunt, and it helped keep him calm when invisible flies buzzed past his ears a couple of times on the walk back up to the highway. The tree on the corner of Alameda was practically glowing, and Alex could tell somehow as he walked past it that if he hadn’t been wearing so much protective gear, the scent would have made tears spring to his eyes.

The washed-out sorrow faded as he walked, and he kept his eyes averted from Walnut Street. Something pulled at him as he passed the dirt road that ran between the backyards of the houses on Walnut and Juniper though, and nausea pooled like acid in his stomach as he glanced sideways. The lane seemed to stretch out and out and out, far further than it should have done, right to the end of the world.

There was a car coming around the corner, and Alex forced his eyes shut, opening them as the car passed so it would disrupt the haunt. It was a sick _of course_ feeling that went through him when he saw the driver, just for a second before the car was gone. Alex watched it go, a shivery feeling in the pit of his empty, cramping stomach. 

His father still lived on Walnut Street. He made himself compress the feeling into a simple fact, and took a deep breath before he started to walk again. His father still lived at his childhood home. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t seen Alex. It didn’t matter.

When Alex had been a kid, the DeLuca house had been painted sky blue with yellow frames around the doors and windows. It still was, but it had obviously been a good few years since the paint had been touched up. Maria flung the door open before he could even knock, and smiled when she saw him. “Perfect timing, nine on the dot!”

“Military habit,” Alex told her, stepping in for a hug when she opened her arms. 

“Come on.” She ushered him in, and he looked around as she closed the door behind him. It all looked exactly the same. Even the wall hangings were unchanged. The living room had the same ugly brown couches, still covered in bright throws and cushions. The tall chairs at the kitchen bar still didn’t match. There were still candles on every single surface, and Mimi’s favourite rose quartz was still in pride of place on the coffee table, the biggest crystal Alex had ever seen. He and Liz had always joked that it would have been great at fending off burglars, if Mimi or Maria had been able to lift it.

“No Guerin?” Maria asked as she went into the kitchen.

Guilt twisted through Alex’s insides. “I guess he figured the invite wasn’t for him.”

“Hm. Well, his loss.”

The DeLuca house normally smelled of incense, but right now it smelled of batter, and Alex breathed in gratefully and drifted over to the back patio, revelling in the feeling of _not_ being watched. It was like the house was in a bubble of sorts, protecting it from whatever was influencing the rest of the town. The back doors were wide open, and there were already plates on the table out there. Alex grinned when he saw the little glass bottle in the middle of the table, with a single flower in it. “You really pulled out all the stops, huh?”

“Eh.” Maria shrugged, smiling. “Who else would I pull them out for? Not every day your best friend comes home after so long away.”

“You ever gonna let me forget that?”

“Maybe when I’m dead.” She gestured for him to sit outside. “Waffles are coming up, gimme two seconds, you are _not_ allowed to help. You still like syrup?”

He laughed. “Yes please.”

Alex sat down and looked out over the yard. Mimi had always said that she didn’t see any point in trying to cultivate a lawn that the sun would only dry to dust without constant watering, so she’d cultivated as many local plants as possible instead. Over a dozen varieties of cactus coexisted happily, and the two mesquite trees at the bottom of the yard were still growing strong. 

Maria came out a couple of minutes later with a tray. Waffles, coffee, and syrup were unloaded, and she sat down opposite him with a pleased little grin. “Perfect.”

“Nice job.” He lifted his cup and clinked it against hers. “Best breakfast I’ve had in years.”

“You haven’t even eaten any yet!”

“I don’t need to for it to already be better than most of my breakfasts,” he said dryly, but obediently tucked in.

Mimi’s absence was conspicuous, and he considered how to broach the topic while he hummed around his mouthful of waffle. “Good?” Maria teased, and he made a happy sound to make her laugh. 

“Guerin told me about Mimi,” he said when he’d swallowed. Asking Maria point-blank where her mother was would have been too cruel, and it was already terrible to have to watch the way Maria’s smile dropped, her shoulders slumping.

“What did he say?” she asked, cutting into her own waffle.

“That she has early-onset dementia, or something.”

“Or something.” Maria laughed bitterly and shook her head, putting a small bite into her mouth and pursing her lips around the fork as she withdrew it. “Or something,” she muttered.

Alex frowned, eating more slowly. “What do you mean?”

Maria sighed, looking out over the yard for a moment, cutlery still on her plate. “It started maybe seven or eight years ago. Or that’s when it started becoming impossible to ignore. I’ve taken her to six different doctors, and it all comes down to the same thing – she doesn’t have dementia, or Alzheimer’s, or a tumour, or anything. All brain activity looks normal, and a few of them even suggested that she was _faking_ it, like my mom would ever do something like that.” She shook her head and cut into her waffle with sharp, jerky movements. “I even took her to a couple of faith healers,” she went on, not looking at Alex. “I’ve spent _thousands_ of dollars trying to help her, trying to figure out what’s even wrong in the first place, and none of it went anywhere.”

And where had Alex been? Maria hadn’t mentioned any other friends last night at the Pony, and Alex could only imagine how busy her schedule was. She’d complained last night about how difficult it was to date when she worked almost every evening and spent her days just keeping the bar running. She’d had three friends in high school, and in the space of a few weeks, one had died and the other two had skipped town and dropped out of contact with her completely.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and wished it was even halfway adequate to cover how terrible everything was.

Maria shook her head, eating another bite of waffle. “It is what it is,” she mumbled. “I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do. She’s in Sunset Mesa Assisted Living, and she’s happy enough, but…God, I visit every week, but I have to make myself do it. Isn’t that awful?” She looked across the table at him, face creased in misery. “She’s my mom, she’s my best friend in the whole world, and I have to force myself to visit her just once a week. It’s like, she doesn’t even recognise me most of the time, so I find myself asking, what’s the point?”

Alex couldn’t imagine how painful that had to be for her, and put down his cutlery to reach out and grab her hand. “Maria…” He had no idea what to say, and she could tell. She squeezed his hand and pushed her lips into a sad, empty smile.

“Yeah. It sucks.”

“It fucking sucks,” he agreed, brows pulled down. “I wish there was something I could…if there’s anything I can do, tell me, okay? Seriously, anything.”

“Thanks.” She sighed and let go of his hand, going back to her breakfast. “I don’t think there is though. You know how we used to say this town drives people crazy? It’s like it actually did, for her.”

Alex was still hungry, but the idea of continuing to eat made him feel sick. He picked up his coffee instead. “What do you mean?”

“She thinks aliens are real,” Maria said quietly, another forkful of waffle disappearing into her mouth. “She thinks Independence Day really happened, and Will Smith saved the planet from an impending invasion.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Maria shook her head. “It’s so messed up. I’m only thirty, you know? I’m too young for this, I mean…it’s like she’s died, but her body’s living over at Sunset Mesa, spouting shit about the alien scum coming to take over Earth. It’s like a bad movie.” She finished off her plate and picked up her own cup, looking out across the yard rather than at Alex. “I keep thinking that, y’know? I’m too young to lose my mom. I know when we were kids we thought thirty year-olds were grown-ups, but…”

“Yeah,” Alex said quietly. “I know.”

“You don’t feel like an adult?” She looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “You’re a retired Air Force Captain.”

“Discharged,” Alex corrected, and shook his head. “The military’s like another world. I don’t…I really thought about staying in. Making it a real lifelong career like, like my dad did.” He had to force those words out, and hurried on once he had. “Everything makes sense, in that world. You know exactly where you stand, and you know exactly what you have to do. It’s easy. They make it so easy to just do what you’re told and move with the crowd.”

“You always said that was the opposite of what you wanted to do,” Maria murmured, and he nodded, lifting his coffee cup to his lips.

“I didn’t mean to enlist until I did. And…I don’t know. I don’t regret it. I can’t.”

“Even after losing your leg?”

Alex smiled. He’d forgotten that about Maria; the way she could be gentle, gentle, gentle, until she came out with a question so sharp you didn’t even realise what had happened until she’d sliced you in two. It was a side-effect of seeing so much, she’d always said. She hadn’t even realised she was doing it most of the time when they were kids, but he was sure she knew what she was doing now.

“Even then,” he said. “It gave me a lot too. But yeah, I don’t feel like I’m grown up either, not as a civilian. I was just a kid when I enlisted. There’s so much I’ve never done, and being a shade isn’t exactly a normal job. I don’t even know if I can…if I know _how_ to be a normal person after all this. Every time I think about getting a normal job, I think about how I’d have to find somewhere permanent to live and it just stops me cold.”

“But you can’t be a shade forever,” Maria said. Not judging, just stating a fact, and Alex sighed.

“Yeah. But I don’t know how to…I don’t know…”

“You don’t know how to stop fighting.”

Alex sat back, momentarily frozen. “Yeah,” he managed to say, kind of floored. He’d never thought of it like that before, but she was right. 

Maria just nodded, and in that moment Alex saw Mimi in her so strongly it was like the two women were both sitting there at once. “You want more coffee?” she asked, getting up. “Or juice or something?”

He nodded, still a little stunned. “Juice would be…yeah, thanks.”

She gave him a sort of half-smile and went back inside, taking her empty plate with her. Alex looked down at his own half-eaten waffle and tried to imagine, not for the first time, what his life would have been like if he hadn’t enlisted. It was impossible to imagine that without somehow retconning the role Michael had played in his life, and thinking about that always hurt, so he generally stayed away from those what-if scenarios.

But if he and Michael _had_ done things differently…if they hadn’t gone back to the tool shed that day, if they’d never kissed that day at all, what path might Alex’s life have taken? Maybe nothing would have happened, but maybe he and Michael would have had a real romance, maybe a relationship. Maybe they could have left Roswell for somewhere like Santa Fe or Albuquerque, somewhere where Alex’s father couldn’t reach them. Maybe shared a tiny apartment. Maybe shared a life. 

Alex closed his eyes and dug his knuckles into them. That right there was why he tried not to play the what-if game – it just hurt too much.

“Alright, who’s the guy?”

He startled as Maria came back out and set a glass of orange juice in front of him with a click of glass on glass. “What?”

“The guy! I know that face.” She grinned as she sat down opposite him, her cup refilled and steaming. “From senior year! The night that mystery guy kissed you at the museum.”

Alex shook his head, a startled laugh halfway to his mouth. “How do you do that?”

“Wait, seriously?” Her eyes widened. “It’s the museum guy? The guy who kissed you into crazy stupid love for like, a single day, and then you refused to speak about him ever again?”

“It was a bad time,” he reminded her. Rosa had died the night he and Michael had kissed, and what with that and the way things had ended in the tool shed, Alex hadn’t exactly wanted to unburden his soul to his also-grieving best friends.

“Yeah, but it isn’t now! Come on, spill, I’ve been waiting over ten years for this.” She leaned forward, eager. “I know you didn’t wanna out him when we were kids, but is that still an issue? Is he still local?”

Alex licked his lips and looked down at his plate. “It’s complicated.”

“He’s not married or something is he?” Maria asked, sobering.

“No, nothing like that.” Alex swallowed and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Sounds like you want me to guess,” she snorted, and put her chin in her hand, pretending to think. “You’ve only been back in town for a day, and you’ve spent pretty much all that time with Guerin, so unless it’s _him_, I don’t…” She trailed off when Alex didn’t smile, and instead darted a look up at her, his silence giving her all the confirmation she needed. Her lips parted, and she blinked several times before she found her voice again. “Michael Guerin?”

Alex took a deep breath and nodded, stomach churning. 

“Wow.” Maria exhaled heavily and reached for her coffee. She took a gulp and then shook her head, still apparently stunned. “_Guerin_ is your museum guy. That’s…wow. Do you remember what you told me when he kissed you?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, and Alex nodded, a rueful smile tugging at his lips.

“That I’d stay in Roswell, if only he kept kissing me.”

“But you didn’t.” She frowned slightly, concerned. “What happened, Alex? Is he straight? He’s not…” She narrowed her eyes, obviously thinking. “He’s not gay, is he?”

“Bi, I guess, or whatever.” Alex tapped his fingertips against the cold glass of juice Maria had given him. “Doesn’t really matter.”

“Did he not want to come out, or…?”

“No, it wasn’t that.” Alex swallowed. “I don’t know if I should…he said I could tell you whatever, but it’s…it’s not…”

He could practically feel the confusion radiating from Maria. If Michael had hurt him, Alex wouldn’t have come back to Roswell for him, and wouldn’t have been so easy in his company last night at the Pony. If it had been a case of Michael wanting to stay closeted, Alex wouldn’t be tiptoeing around it like he was.

“What happened?” she asked again, quiet and serious.

“He was living in my dad’s tool shed,” he said, not looking at her. “You remember those rumours about how he lived in his truck?”

“Yeah. They were true?”

“Yeah. So I told him…you know, I’d slept out there often enough, I knew it was comfortable. I told him he could stay there, and we hung out a couple of times. And then that day at the museum…after my shift, we went back to the tool shed.” He swallowed, watching Maria’s elegant hands on the table. “And after, my dad caught us.”

Her hands pulled back, fingers curling into each other and gripping tight. “Oh shit.”

“Yeah.” He laughed, empty and dry. 

“Oh _shit._” She sucked in a sharp breath. “His hand?”

Alex nodded, closing his eyes for a moment. “My dad…he hit him with a hammer. And I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t –”

“Whoa, hey.” She reached out, faster than he’d expected, and grabbed his hand, his cold fingertips suddenly covered by her warmth. When he looked up, she was frowning at him seriously. “Alex, this was not your fault.”

He tried to smile. “Kind of was though.”

“No.” She pulled his hand closer to her and folded her other one around it as well. “It really wasn’t.”

“Yeah. Well.” He swallowed and looked down again, pulling his hand slowly out of her grip. “End result was the same. I enlisted, never thought I’d come back to Roswell or see Michael ever again.”

“So you haven’t been in contact with him at all?” Maria asked, surprised. “Is this stuff about the Evans twins –?”

“Yeah, they’re really missing.”

“I didn’t think he even liked Max anymore,” she frowned. “You know he’s a cop now, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” Maria made a face. “I try not to hold it against him, but y’know. Ugh. Anyway, Max has picked Guerin up from the Pony before in a ‘professional capacity’, and it’s never been pretty.”

“You mean he’s arrested him?” Alex raised his eyebrows.

“Drunk and disorderly is kind of Guerin’s speciality.” She rolled her eyes. “It comes in phases, but he’ll come in spoiling for a fight, and there’s plenty of assholes happy to give him one. Sometimes I think he just likes getting beat down. He’s never served time or anything, but he’s had court appearances and community service, and he’s no stranger to the drunk tank. And whenever Max is the guy picking him up, it gets kinda ugly. It’s sad, you remember how close they were in school? And then, I don’t know, something must’ve happened, because Guerin only ever resists arrest when it’s Max.”

Alex leaned back in his chair, absorbing that. It was easy to imagine, and Michael had already told him point-blank he got into fights. Michael and his cowboy swagger, his easy strength, his loose-limbed gait and sharp tongue. It was easy to picture Michael grinning with blood on his teeth, easy to imagine him throwing punches and spitting insults, starting fights and getting hauled out by the cops.

Alex hated violent people.

“Hey.” Maria squeezed his hand. “Guerin may be kind of a jerk, but he’s a good guy.”

“You were just saying last night how much you hated the people who got into fights at the Pony,” Alex said quietly.

“Yeah, but…I don’t know.” Maria sighed, taking her hands back to pick up her coffee, cradling it against her chest. “I’ve never banned Guerin. He talks a big game, but he always comes through when I need a favour from him. Money, he’s bad at – I think he’s paid off his tab in full maybe three times over the last decade, if that – but he’s fixed my till like eight times, and he fixed up my drive sign, and he even fixed the plumbing in the bathrooms when the pipes froze a couple winters ago, and let me tell you, that wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted.

“And he can keep his mouth shut, when it’s important,” she added after a moment, looking down at her cup. “The night I had to put my mom in Sunset Mesa, he found me crying in the bar and he was real good about it. Gave me a hug and everything, and never brought it up again. He’s just kind of a mess, that’s all.”

Alex didn’t know what to make of it, but what he kept coming back to were the memories he’d treasured for so long, of Michael as a sharp-faced teenager with overlarge clothes and a wary expression, his smooth body and breathless hesitation when Alex had first unzipped his pants. The Michael he’d briefly known then was a lifetime away from the Michael who had found him in Las Cruces, the Michael Maria knew so well. The similar-strange, at work again, in a more mundane sense.

“He’s a good guy,” Maria said again, quiet and firm. “And hey, so what if he’s a jerk sometimes? So are you.” 

Alex smiled reluctantly and looked up at her. She smirked back and pulled her legs up onto her chair, tilting her thighs sideways against its arm. “So. Michael Guerin is your museum guy.” She grinned and shook her head. “Was he good? He’s good, right?”

Alex’s eyes widened. “Wait, you haven’t –”

“Oh my God, no!” Maria’s horror was so over the top that they both laughed. “No, I _never_ sleep with my customers. I’ve heard it from others though.”

“Who?” Alex asked, morbidly curious, and snorted when Maria wrinkled her nose.

“One of my bartenders,” she admitted. “I can’t exactly dictate anyone’s sex life but my own. And she said he was good. But…he was your first?”

Alex’s smile faded, and he nodded. “Neither of us had any idea what we were doing,” he said, looking back down at the table. “But he was…yeah. It was a first for both of us.”

“Was it everything you wanted?”

Alex forced a laugh. “I am not talking about this.”

“Pfft.” Maria rolled her eyes. “Boys, honestly. You’re all useless at this, doesn’t matter how gay you are.”

“Sure it’s not just a me thing?”

“Oh, I’m sure. You know your problem?”

“What?”

“You don’t practice enough. Girls practice talking about stuff right from the second they open their mouths – with their moms, their sisters, their friends, everyone. Boys don’t get the same training. It messes you all up.”

“If you say the words ‘toxic masculinity’, Maria, I swear to God…”

“Look me in the eye and tell me your monster of a father wasn’t the absolute pinnacle of poisonous macho bullshit,” Maria said in a surprisingly hard voice, and when he blinked at her she shrugged and took a sip of her coffee. “But fine, no buzzwords. What’s going on with you two? Let’s get back to that.”

“With me and Guerin?”

“No, you and Max Evans,” Maria said sarcastically. “Yes, you and Guerin! Are you hooking up with him now?”

Alex didn’t blush easily, but he could feel the heat rising in his face. “We did,” he said, addressing the table. “In Las Cruces. But I don’t know what we’re doing now. He’s just…” He shook his head, rubbing his hand over his forehead. “I have no idea what I’m doing. He showed up out of nowhere, and it was…and I think I’m screwing it up, but I don’t even know what _it_ is.”

Maria was quiet, and when he chanced a look at her, her lips were pursed in thought, eyes narrowed. “Do you love him?”

Alex exhaled an almost-laugh and shook his head. “How can you love someone you don’t even know? Even when we were kids, I don’t think we even spoke more than half a dozen times, and he’s a completely different person now. We, we just connected, like…” He huffed out another disbelieving breath. “Like we already knew each other on some level, but we didn’t, we don’t. It doesn’t make any sense for me to feel like this. People don’t fall in love with their first…” He gave up on trying to find a word and gestured helplessly with one hand. “We weren’t in a relationship. We didn’t even have a single _day_.” He fell silent and sighed again, staring down at his plate as though it would hold any answers for him.

Maria was quiet for several long seconds. “Sounds complicated.”

Alex had to laugh. “Yeah.” Talk about an understatement. And that was all _without_ Michael being an alien.

Maria drank her coffee and shifted her legs from one side of the chair to the other. Alex finally picked up his juice and took a sip, the acid sweetness almost painful on his tongue. “You talked to him about any of this?” Maria asked.

Alex snorted and shook his head, his attempt at a smile falling flat. “What would I even say?” he muttered. “It’s been thirteen years. Just because I never got over him doesn’t mean the same is true for him. And besides.” He cleared his throat. “This isn’t even something we should be focusing on right now, not when Max and Isobel are missing and this whole town’s exploded with ghosts overnight.”

“Wait, you think those things are linked? The way Guerin mentioned it last night, I thought they were just victims of whatever’s going on at the moment.” 

Alex hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, erring on the side of caution. “They might’ve been the first victims of this mass-haunting, or maybe whatever happened to them sparked it off. Michael definitely thinks it’s the latter.”

“Why?” She sounded baffled, and it wasn’t like he could blame her. “No offence, it sucks that they’re missing, but there’s nothing special about the Evans twins. Or Noah Bracken, come to that.”

“They’re special to Michael.” Alex sighed and shrugged. “You’re probably right. But either way, we could use an extra pair of eyes on this.”

“Why can’t you call in some legit shades?” Maria asked. “Why hasn’t Guerin?”

“And pay them how?” Alex asked, more cutting than he meant to be. “Since he seems to be one of the only people who’s actually noticing how crazy things have gotten around here.” He leaned forward. “I went to the park by my old house this morning, before I came over. Remember the swing ghost I told you and Mimi about when we were kids?”

“Sure.” She smiled. “The first one you ever saw.”

“According to the Johnson Scale, the ghost I knew should have been a category 6-d, way low on the ladder of hauntings. It moved a couple of swings – that was it. This morning, I was getting physical interaction with my actual person, interaction with the entire swing set, and a lot of shadow-auditory contact.”

Maria shook her head. “Translate that into human for me, Alex.”

“Multiple laughing children, and a definite attempt at influencing me to stay there with them. Nothing scary, not for a shade, but it was pushing me, like –” He mimed giving someone a shove. “And I’m wearing about three different kinds of protection right now. If I wasn’t, who knows how much stronger that influence would’ve been? I bet the only reason you haven’t heard about more missing people and supernatural-related accidents is because people don’t seem to realise that’s what’s going on.”

“I am though.” She frowned, her hand drifting to the pendant necklace she’d shown them last night. “I’ve been noticing it.”

“Yeah.” He sat back in his chair again, eyes narrow. “I can’t figure that out either. I thought maybe it was how sensitive you are, but the way you’ve described it, it doesn’t sound like you’re seeing anywhere near the level of shit I am. Last night in the parking lot, what did you actually see?”

Maria gave him a surprised look. “Nothing. I just got a bad feeling, and obviously there was the creepy quiet factor. You saw something?”

Alex laughed slightly, worried now. “Yeah, Maria. The shadows in this town are completely broken right now, and there were omens in your tree. You didn’t hear any crows?” She shook her head, eyes wide. “Have you seen the flies on your sign either?”

“No.” She put her cup down on the table and unfolded her legs, looking a little freaked out. “I didn’t see any of that. Is this a shade thing? Like, you’ve trained yourself up to see this stuff more?”

“All the training in the world can’t boost your sensitivity by that much. I think I’m seeing what’s really there, and you’re seeing a version of reality that’s closer to what everyone else in Roswell is seeing. Whatever’s influencing the town is influencing you, but your natural sensitivity gives you an edge against it?” He frowned and shook his head. “But you can’t be the only sensitive person in Roswell.”

“I’m the only one you know though,” she pointed out, and he nodded.

“Apart from Mimi, I guess,” he said slowly, and Maria snorted.

“Good luck getting anything useful out of her.”

He let it drop, not wanting to push, and picked up his fork again to finish eating his cold waffle. “Hey,” he said suddenly, frowning at her. “You said your necklace was charmed for protection, right?”

Maria raised her eyebrows, fingers drifting up to her collarbone again. “Yeah, why?”

“Do you ever take it off?”

“Sure, to shower.”

“But never any other time?” She shook her head, and he put his fork down. “Would you try it? Take it off and, I don’t know, walk around the block with me?”

“You think my block is haunted?” she smiled, and it faded when Alex didn’t return it.

“I literally lost count of the number of haunts I passed on the walk over here,” he said. “I wasn’t kidding when I said there’d been an explosion. It’s like Roswell’s infested or something.”

She frowned, but after a second’s hesitation she unlooped the necklace from her neck and set it down on the table. “You wanna go now?”

“Yeah.” He stood up. “Just around the block.”

“Let’s go out the back then.”

The DeLuca house had a dirt track that ran alongside the back of their yard just like Alex’s old house did, like an extra unpaved street between the yards on one side and the yards of the houses one street over. Maria took Alex’s hand as she closed the gate behind them and gave him a look that dared him to say anything about it. He mimed zipping his lips, and she nodded.

“You know, I can’t really remember the last time I actually saw a ghost?” Maria said as they started to walk. Her eyes were darting around, and Alex squeezed her hand, hoping it would help. 

“I can’t remember the last time I held someone’s hand, so we’re one for one on the new-old experiences here.”

“Ha ha.” She slowed as they reached the end of the path. “You see anything yet?”

“Not yet. You want me to tell you if I do?”

“Yeah. Nothing’s gonna happen, is it?”

She’d never been this nervous about the supernatural when they were kids, and Alex had to bite back the instinct to tease. “In full daylight like this, it’s highly unlikely. And if anything does try to actually attack us, I’ve dealt with that plenty of times before.”

She nodded, biting her lip and frowning as she looked both ways before turning right. “What’s the worst job you’ve ever done? Like, what’s the worst a ghost has tried to do to you?”

Alex blew out his cheeks. “Poltergeist in Arizona threw me through a window once. That sucked. And a different poltergeist in Gallup almost broke my neck – that was a clever one, actually. It got a scarf looped round my neck and pushed me through a rotten banister, and if I hadn’t grabbed hold of the scarf, that really might’ve been it for me. And a ghast in an abandoned mineshaft made me think the tunnel was collapsing on me, and I’ve been slightly claustrophobic ever since.”

“Jesus, Alex.” Maria stared at him, clearly disturbed, and he shrugged.

“There’s a reason most shades don’t make it past three years in the job. Point is, I’m not really worried about being attacked in the open like this.” He gestured to their surroundings. “Even if something’s massively amped up the regular little haunts in town, most supernatural activity is fairly tame.”

Maria shook her head and looked forward again. “I kind of hate that that did make me feel better.”

Alex laughed, and blinked as one of the cypress trees in the yard on the corner across the street from them started to burn silently. “Oh hey, there’s one.”

“What? Where?”

“That tree.” Alex pointed. “It’s on fire.”

Maria stopped and squinted at it. “Looks fine to me?”

Alex shrugged. “When was the last time you actually tried to see a ghost?”

“God, probably…with Rosa.” Maria’s shoulders slumped a little. “Before she died.”

“So you’ve spent a long time wearing that necklace and ignoring your senses. It makes sense that you don’t –”

“Shit, I see it.” Maria’s grip on his hand tightened painfully, and Alex looked down at her in surprise.

“Oh. Well, congratulations?”

“Holy shit.” She took a deep breath. “It’s really faint, but I can see it. Is it totally quiet for you too?”

“Yep.”

“This is so weird. I’m definitely seeing this?”

Alex’s lips twitched. “I can’t believe I’m telling my psychic friend that what she’s experiencing is a real haunt.”

“Shut up.” She dug her elbow into his side. “I can read palms like a pro, this is way freakier than the stuff I usually deal with. People aren’t as creepy as ghosts.”

“Not sure I agree, but it’s a matter of opinion, I guess.”

She shook her head and started walking again, eyes still fixed on the silently burning tree as they turned the corner. “What do you think is making it do that?”

“The tree?” Alex glanced at it and tilted his head to the side, considering it. “Emotional attachment and expression would be my first guess. Someone got really attached to that specific tree at some point and associated it with some really strong emotions. Burning is usually anger or forbidden desire.”

“Where would it rate on the scale you were talking about?”

“6-e or f, I think. Unless it can actually burn you, in which case it would be a 6-c or d. And if it turns into real fire, that changes its number to a 5.”

“What’s the difference? Oh!” She jumped as the sound of a glass smashing erupted next to them, and looked around in vain for a cause. “Was that another –?”

“Uh huh. And that’s another there.” A small house on the other side of the street was clearly abandoned, and Alex nodded as its gate started to open and close on its own. Maria shrank against his side, and he squeezed her hand. “It’s just a little spook, don’t worry.”

“You’re treating this like it’s really normal,” she whispered. “But it’s not, right?”

“Oh, it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” he assured her. They kept walking, Alex intentionally not allowing Maria to speed up. It was important to pretend to be unaffected sometimes – fake it till you make it, was what his mentor had told him. The house they passed on their right had a doghouse, and Alex nudged Maria and nodded at it. “See the dog?”

“Oh.” She sounded heartbroken, and Alex sighed.

“It’s dead, Maria.”

“Yeah, but still…” Still, it was a charred skeleton of an animal, sitting next to the empty doghouse and howling silently, smoke rising from its blackened skin. “What do you think happened to it?”

“In the nicest way possible, I think it’s kind of obvious what happened to it.” She elbowed him again, and he cracked a smile. “I don’t know. Pet ghosts are usually pulled into existence by the humans who owned them though, so maybe the owner lost their dog in a fire of some kind? Or maybe the dog is a manifestation of something else and not a real ghost at all, I don’t know. I actually spend at least seventy percent of my time on a job researching the haunt, not actually dealing with it.”

They passed five other ghosts before they got back to Maria’s back yard, and her hands were shaking when she put her necklace back on. “That was horrible.”

“Means your necklace is really powerful though,” Alex said, hoping to cheer her up. “What’s the flower in it?”

Maria tilted the pendant to frown down at it. “I don’t actually know. But I know it’s an heirloom – it was my gramma’s before it was my mom’s. It’s a sort of coming-of-age thing for the girls in our family, apparently. Always made me wonder what would happen if any of them had more than one daughter, but so far, that hasn’t happened.” She sighed and dropped it, looking up at him. “So what’s the plan? Is Guerin coming to get us, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Alex had to admit. “We didn’t really arrange anything last night. I think…he thought I was coming back to his with him, but I don’t know, I didn’t…I wanted some space, I guess.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Maria said firmly. “You should talk to him though, seriously.”

“Yeah.” He looked away. “Probably. Look, I’ll go to the junkyard now, and I’ll get Michael, and we’ll figure out where to go from there. I’ll keep you updated.”

“Okay.” She gestured him forward and pulled him into a tight hug that he returned. “Be safe.”

“You too.” 

He got another uber to the junkyard, counting his breaths through the waves of feeling watched, and tried to convince himself as he walked in through the open gate that he wasn’t nervous. It helped that the hostility of the atmosphere seemed to dim the further into the yard he walked. Michael wasn’t visible, and Alex approached his Airstream and stopped when he got to the weird hubcap gazebo structure, trying to order his thoughts. It wasn’t usually difficult for him, but all he could think of was whether Michael was in his trailer or the bunker, and what his reaction would be when he saw Alex again.

He froze when the trailer door swung open and Michael stepped out, dressed in dark jeans and a plain white t-shirt, black hat on his head. Alex’s breath caught in his throat, and he kind of hated himself for it. Michael looked over at him with dark eyes, and Alex had to force himself to walk towards him, past the lawn chairs they’d sat in yesterday before he’d screwed things up.

“How was Maria?” Michael asked, casual as anything, and Alex frowned.

“Fine. You know you were invited too, right?” he asked, but Michael shook his head.

“Nah, thought I’d let you two catch up a bit more. She still cool with helping out?”

“Yeah.” Alex paused, wrong-footed, and in the gap Michael rolled his eyes.

“Relax, man. I’m not gonna jump you.”

“What if I wanted you to?” Alex asked before he could even think about it, and couldn’t bring himself to regret it when Michael tipped his chin back and gave him a slow once-over.

“I’d say you should make up your mind,” he said, voice as slow as his gaze, and heat curled in Alex’s belly. He looked down to try and get some equilibrium, and Michael took a step closer. “What do you want, Alex?”

Wasn’t that the ten-million-dollar question?

Alex hated feeling out of control. He relied on his processes, on his strategies, on following scripts and chains of command and lists. Uncertainty was the enemy. It slowed you down and made you an easy target. 

If you were fighting, anyway. 

He breathed out and looked at Michael again. “I’m not used to it mattering.”

Michael seemed to look right into him, holding his gaze without any of the hesitation Alex was feeling. “Matters to me,” he said finally. “Always has.”

“Always?”

Michael’s lashes swept down, and up again, like he couldn’t make himself look away from Alex’s face for more than a second. “Since this started.”

Alex couldn’t tell whether the shivery feeling that went through him at that was relief or fear. It seemed impossible that Michael had thought about him at all in the intervening years, unless it had been to regret ever accepting Alex’s clumsy offer of hospitality. He couldn’t hold Michael’s gaze the way Michael could hold his. He needed the respite, the occasional second to recover. He looked away, the warm breeze ruffling his hair. “What do you want?” he finally asked, turning back to Michael just in time to see him smile his humourless smile.

“What I want hasn’t changed.”

Exasperation broke through Alex’s nerves at last, and he almost rolled his eyes. “What is that, Guerin? Sex?”

“You think it was ever only about sex?” Michael narrowed his eyes and snorted, like Alex was being dense on purpose.

“Well it’s not like we ever talked about it,” Alex burst out. “We just…we skipped that, we didn’t even get to know each other.”

Michael leaned back on his heels, hooking his thumbs in his pockets. “You saying you regret it?”

“No! I just don’t understand why you don’t.” Alex didn’t understand what was happening, or how Michael seemed to have the ability to drag truths he only half knew himself out of his head, like drawing poison from a wound.

Michael shook his head, still smiling like Alex was playing some sort of cruel joke on him. “I don’t regret anything about you.”

It made no sense at all, the way Alex had to blink so fast, the way he suddenly had to swallow around a lump in his throat. Nothing about it made sense. Michael made no sense.

“You wanna get going?” Michael asked quietly. “Or you wanna stay?”

Alex didn’t know whether he was referring to the way they should be leaving to get Maria, or whether he meant leaving Roswell, or leaving Michael himself. There were too many potential layers to it, and he was too afraid of the answer to ask for clarification. It was easier to let it exist in a nebulous in-between state, neither one thing nor another.

He walked forward rather than reply, and the moment his hand touched Michael’s arm, Michael was in motion, always certain where Alex wavered. He slid his hands around the sides of Alex’s neck and kissed him like it was simple, and Alex let him. He wrapped his arms around Michael and kissed back, desire igniting in him like a brushfire, fast and deadly. 

He was still the one to pull back first, suddenly aware of how exposed they were, out in the open like this. Before he had to make an excuse, Michael nodded, forehead pressed to his and good hand cupping the back of his neck, the brim of his hat knocked back and resting a little against Alex’s head. “Yeah,” he murmured, like Alex had asked him a question. “We should…”

Alex nodded too, but made no move to let go. “Yeah,” he echoed instead, breathing far too fast from just a few kisses. 

“Okay.” Michael exhaled slowly, and Alex watched his eyes open, and held back the urge to shiver when Michael dragged his hands down from Alex’s shoulders to his elbows before stepping back. “Okay. You wanna go get Maria?”

“It’s your case,” Alex said. “What do you wanna do?”

“My case, is it?” Michael’s lips twitched, at least this time with real amusement. His hands were still on Alex’s elbows, and he slid one back up to Alex’s shoulder and down again, somehow hot even through the layer of Alex’s jacket. “Careful there. You’ll give me airs, treating me like a real shade.”

“You are a real shade.” Alex took a quick breath and stepped away, hoping the distance would clear his head a little. “You’re just not a licenced one.”

Michael laughed. “I’ll be sure to make that distinction to the judge. Will you be my witness?”

Alex shook his head, a reluctant smile tugging at his own lips. “Come on. Let’s go.”

He still felt like they were leaving too many things unsaid, but he didn’t want to broach the topic again, not when they seemed to be back on an even footing. Michael led the way over to his truck, and Alex climbed in beside him, relaxing a little in the sun-warmed interior.

“Maria’s necklace is protecting her from the worst of the haunts,” he told Michael as he turned the engine over and started to drive. “But when she takes it off, her sensitivity is good. She hasn’t forgotten about Max and Isobel being missing either, but I don’t think she gets why you care so much. She said you and Max don’t get on these days.”

“He’s still my brother,” Michael said shortly. “Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t like me, I’m still gonna find him.” He sighed. “He’s gonna kill me for telling you.”

“Even if it helps him?”

“We promised, we swore we’d never tell anyone, not ever. Isobel hasn’t even told her husband what we are.” Michael shook his head. “If either of them told, I’d be pissed too. It puts us all in danger.”

“Only if you put your trust in the wrong person.” Alex looked over at him. “I’m used to keeping secrets, Guerin. Yours is safe with me.” Michael didn’t reply, but tilted his head towards him like he would have looked at Alex properly if he could. Alex hesitated. “That said, you should decide how much you want Maria to know.”

“She’s not finding out what we are,” Michael said immediately, his voice hard.

“I’m not saying she has to, but we’ll need to think of some sort of cover story to explain why you think these haunts and Max, Isobel, and Noah’s disappearances are linked. Do you want her to know you’re related?”

“That’s fine.” Michael frowned, hands at two and ten on the steering wheel, hat casting a shadow over his eyes. “It’s the alien stuff she can’t know about.”

“Okay, so…” Alex laced his fingers together on his knees. “How about we tell her that your sensitivity is different to most people’s? That you, Max, and Isobel have always had a different way of perceiving the supernatural, and you don’t tend to talk about it because it freaks people out.”

“You think she’ll believe that?”

“Trust me, the last thing she’ll think is aliens,” Alex said dryly.

Michael didn’t look convinced. “She believes in a lot of weird shit though.”

“Okay, but there’s a big difference between crystals and _aliens_, especially in this town.”

Michael frowned. “What would you think? If I gave you that story?”

“I’d think you three had some sort of rare genetic disorder, or maybe something wrong with your eyes, if I didn’t know your sensitivity isn’t just visual. You know sometimes when people have their cataracts removed they can see ultraviolet light? I’d think it was something like that.”

“Hmm.” Michael pulled his lower lip between his teeth, worrying at it for a second. “Okay. You think she’ll buy that?”

“I think she’ll buy that theory over extra-terrestrials any day. Seriously, Guerin, we live in _Roswell._ If you hadn’t floated my phone charger into shapes in front of me and shown me pieces of your downed spaceship, I wouldn’t believe you either. I’d be more likely to believe you’re a mutant or a wizard.”

Michael finally smiled. “I’d be a pretty cool wizard.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Alex tried to keep his own urge to smile under control. “We’ve got Maria’s help – what do you want us to do?”

Michael nodded, sobering. “Check their houses again. I don’t know if there’s stuff there I missed because I can’t see it like you do. Isobel and Noah’s place, then Max’s.”

“Then what?”

“See if that turns anything up.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Michael clearly wasn’t a big planner. He scowled at the road. “Noah’s office, maybe.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll think of something, okay?” Michael shifted gears and sped up. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Okay,” Alex said softly. Michael wasn’t a planner, but he was. They could balance each other out on this. Max, Isobel, and Noah would have been missing for exactly a week come tonight, if Alex had guessed the timeline correctly. They needed to get a move on.

“Damn.” Maria whistled as she walked into Isobel and Noah’s house, and Alex understood the sentiment. The Evans-Bracken house was a two-storey place on a street where every front yard was well-watered and tidy. Alex had been in all sorts of houses over the last two years, but Isobel and Noah’s was definitely one of the nicest. It looked like something out of a catalogue, the front door opening into a huge living room with a large fireplace, a good-sized open-plan kitchen off to the side. The stairs wrapped around one wall, leading upstairs in an elegant sweep. Maria turned in a circle, taking it all in. “I knew she was living it up, but this is _nice._”

“She likes things looking nice,” Michael muttered, closing the door behind him. He’d told Maria on the way over that Max and Isobel were his siblings, separated in foster care, and Maria had been duly shocked. She gave Michael an apologetic look over her shoulder and touched her necklace.

“You want us to just look around?”

Michael nodded, and glanced at Alex, who was shifting his foot in his shoe to feel the grit of the salt under his sole. “Do you see anything?” he asked Michael. “Cause I don’t.”

Michael stepped slowly into the middle of the room and tilted his head, peering up at the high ceiling and then closing his eyes. “Nothing,” he said after a moment, opening his eyes. “But I might be missing stuff, I don’t know.”

“We’ll check.” Maria took her necklace off and put it down on the coffee table. She beckoned to Alex as she straightened. “Come on, we’re not splitting up.”

“It’d be more efficient,” Alex said, teasing, and she rolled her eyes.

“We’ve both seen enough horror movies to know better, come on.” She led the way upstairs, and Michael trailed behind them as they went.

The rest of the house was just as picture perfect. It was kind of creepy, after a certain point. If there hadn’t been clearly used toothbrushes in the master bedroom’s ensuite, Alex would have started thinking that no one had ever really lived there at all. Every room was pristine. There weren’t any scuff marks on the walls, no clutter on the surfaces, no dust on the windowsills.

Alex paused, brushing a shelf in the guest bedroom with his fingertips. “Do they have a cleaner?” he asked Michael, and turned to see him standing miserably in the doorway.

“Yeah.” Michael straightened. “Tina. She comes in on Fridays.”

“You seen her this week?”

“Nah.” Michael shook his head. “Didn’t even think of it. I know how to find her though.”

“She with an agency?” Maria asked, looking out of the window.

“Don’t think so.” Michael jerked his head. “Come on. Unless you’re seeing something?”

“Alex?” Maria glanced at him uncertainly, and Alex hurried to her side and followed her gaze. “That’s a ghost, right?”

In the yard next door was a human shape covered in a white sheet. It might have been unremarkable if the head hadn’t protruded at the front, like whoever was underneath it had a long snout, and if long blades of grass weren’t visibly growing from its head and shoulders, through the sheet. They were growing in front of Alex’s eyes, slowly protruding from the sheet and stretching towards the sky before dying and dropping away. They vanished before they hit the ground, and Alex nodded.

“Yeah. That’s definitely something.” Probably not a ghost, but definitely an apparition of some kind. Possibly a ghast or some other kind of haunt.

“Let me see.” Michael came over and stood on Alex’s other side, frowning. “Huh. Yeah, I see it. Looks like a pretty strong one.”

As if it had heard them, the ghost’s head turned. Familiar instinctive fear gripped Alex’s insides as it looked up at them, the rest of its body absolutely still underneath the sheet. He _felt_ it when it looked at them, like a gong was going off behind his eyes, and he realised what it was too late.

The sound of the hammer connecting with flesh and bone mingled with the burn of sand in his eyes, mingled with the stickiness of tears on his cheeks, mingled with soreness in his throat from screaming. Screaming as his father broke Michael’s hand, screaming as his CO’s body spun through the air.

It was like the strongest sense memory he’d ever had, and Alex went very still to compress it, squeezing his eyes shut and forcing down his natural reactions. Next to him, Maria was on her knees, and he guessed her hands were over her mouth because the awful half-screams she was making were muffled.

“Alex!” Michael’s hand gripped his arm. Alex felt it as his father’s hand, huge and crushing, and wrenched away with a gasp, eyes opening. He stumbled backwards into the bed, half falling onto it, and Michael looked horrified, looking between him and Maria with his hands outstretched. “What’s happening? What the hell is it, tell me what to do!”

Alex shook his head, trying to catch his breath, and Michael looked down at Maria and reached out helplessly to touch her shoulder. When she screamed and shrank away, he flinched back so violently that he banged off the wall, then looked up and shoved the window open. “Don’t!” Alex choked out, but Michael had already flung out one hand, and suddenly the horror stopped.

It just…stopped.

Alex could hear Maria breathing heavily on the floor, and he wasn’t doing much better himself. “Guerin,” he whispered, and Michael was there, kneeling in front of him so their heads were more level.

“Are you okay?” His hands hovered over Alex’s legs, and Alex nodded, grabbing onto Michael’s shoulder. “What was that? What happened?” He twisted to look over his shoulder with wide eyes as Maria started to cry.

“Leech,” Alex managed, and squeezed Michael’s shoulder. “It’s okay.” He used Michael to push himself to his feet and stumbled over to Maria. “Maria?”

She turned around to put her back to the wall, and pulled her legs up against her chest as she cried even harder, burying her face against her knees.

“Leech?” Michael repeated, sounding stunned. “What…that was a leech?”

“Yeah.” Alex sat down next to Maria and stretched both legs out in front of him. “Can you go get her necklace?”

“Sure.” Michael wobbled a little as he stood, and hurried out. Alex heard him running down the stairs, and looked at Maria.

“Can you hear me?” She sobbed, but nodded. “Okay, that’s good. I don’t know what it made you see, but it’s not happening anymore. Do you want me to touch you?”

“No!”

“Okay.” He kept his voice low. “Do you want me and Michael to leave you alone for a bit?”

She nodded again, hiccupping through more body-shaking sobs, and he levered himself awkwardly to his feet again, wishing he hadn’t sat down. “Okay. We’ll be downstairs, alright? Take as long as you need.” Michael came thundering back in, Maria’s necklace in his hand, and Alex took it and put it on the floor next to her. “Your necklace is here.” He backed out and grabbed Michael’s arm to pull him with him.

“You’re just gonna leave her?” Michael hissed, scandalised.

“That’s what she wants. Move, Guerin.” He gave Michael a gentle push towards the stairs. “I wouldn’t want an audience for something like that either.”

“You don’t think she needs a friend?” Michael looked over his shoulder at the guest room as Alex steered him away from it, and he squeezed Michael’s arm to keep him moving.

“She might later, but right now she wants to be alone. You have to trust people when they say what they want, Guerin.”

That earned him a sharp look, but Michael finally started down the stairs. “Seems wrong,” he muttered, and Alex couldn’t help smiling faintly.

“Hey, it’s sweet that you wanna help. You’re a good friend.”

Michael looked around at him with wide, surprised eyes, then frowned, pausing on the steps. “What, DeLuca? She’s not…we’re not friends.”

Alex tilted his head, grip firm on the banister as he walked down beside Michael. “What, she’s just your bartender?”

“Yeah.” Michael kept frowning, and started descending the stairs to keep up with Alex.

“Who’s never banned you from her bar, despite your occasionally antisocial behaviour?”

“Look, the fights aren’t a big deal,” Michael said defensively. “It’s just blowing off steam.”

“Who lets you rack up a stupidly high bar tab, and goes to you for help fixing stuff?”

“She knows I’m good for it, that’s all.”

“Mmhm. And she told you about Mimi?”

They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Michael narrowed his eyes at Alex like he was trying to figure something out. “Yeah. Kinda.”

“She told me this morning you were a good guy,” Alex said, not sure whether to be amused or exasperated.

Michael snorted. “Was she drunk?” 

“Oh my God, Guerin.” Alex rolled his eyes and walked over to sit on Isobel’s very nice, very clean couch. “It is possible that she likes you as a person, you know.”

“Nah, doesn’t sound like DeLuca.” Michael flopped down in the armchair next to the couch, legs spread obnoxiously wide. “She’s ruthless. A mercenary woman.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Right, just like you’re an asshole cowboy.”

“I _am_ an asshole cowboy.”

“Quit pretending to be an idiot, it doesn’t suit you.” Alex gave him an unimpressed look. “She likes you. You can like her back, it won’t kill you.” Michael looked so uncomfortable at the idea that Alex had to laugh. “You’re acting like you’ve never had a friend before.”

“She was screaming!” Michael glared at him. “I just wanted to make sure she’s okay. Are you okay?” he added, slouching in his chair.

“I’m fine.” Alex sat very still. “I’m wearing iron. I should’ve given some to Maria.”

“You said leeches were on your blacklist,” Michael said cautiously, and Alex nodded.

“First time I’ve actually encountered one. They’re pretty distinctive.”

“They make you see your worst memories, right?”

“Sort of.” Alex cleared his throat, looking down at his knees. “It’s sort of like a flashback, but they feel different, to me anyway.” Luckily, his brain seemed to be more wired for nightmares than flashbacks. For a given value of lucky, anyway. “Less immersive.”

Michael frowned up at the stairs. “She was screaming,” he said after a long moment, and Alex wondered what he was thinking.

“She’ll be okay.” He looked around at the perfect, beautiful living room and sighed, pushing himself to his feet. “There’s nothing here that I can see. The leech was in next door’s yard. This place is empty. Like, weirdly empty.”

“What d’you mean?” Michael got up as well, following Alex as he walked around the couch and drifted over to the kitchen.

“The background level of supernatural shit has been so amped up here, I’d expect _something_, but there’s nothing.” He realised something, and turned around to face Michael. “These distortions, you said Max and Isobel can see them too, right? Can they destroy them the way you can too?”

“Sure.” Michael shrugged, frowning. “They just don’t use it like I do. But it makes sense Isobel would keep her house clean.”

Alex nodded, looking around again. “Do you actively or passively repel haunts?”

“Actively I guess?” Michael shrugged again. “They’re not sentient or whatever, are they? They don’t choose to avoid me.”

“Some are,” Alex said. “It’s kind of controversial, but proper ghosts – the deceased – have been proven to have independent thoughts, and memories separate from their lives.”

Michael shrugged again. “They all look the same to me.”

“What do?”

They both looked up as Maria came slowly down the stairs. Her eyes were swollen, the makeup completely wiped off. “Don’t give me those looks,” she warned as they went over to her. “We’re not talking about it. What looks the same to Guerin?”

“Ghosts,” Alex said, playing along. “To his eyes, they all look the same.”

“Weird.” Maria sniffed and drew herself up. “We done here?”

“We can drop you home,” Michael offered immediately, but Maria shook her head. 

“We’re hitting Max’s house next, right? I’ve always wanted to see what he lives like.”

Max’s place was as nice as Isobel’s, in a very different way. It was smaller, and easier to search, and it actually looked like someone lived there. The bed was unmade, and there were a few rinsed but unwashed dishes in the sink. Alex read the titles of the books on the extensive bookshelves, and thought of Isobel’s picture-perfect house, and of Michael’s Airstream at the junkyard.

There was no supernatural activity at Max’s either, but they did leave with the slim laptop Alex found in his desk drawer, and got lunch together at a Mexican restaurant that hadn’t been there when Alex had been a kid. Michael was noticeably distracted, so Alex and Maria ended up making most of the conversation, mostly more town gossip Alex had missed out on.

He didn’t ask her to take off her necklace again, since she’d made no move to do so at Max’s and he didn’t want to push her on it after she’d so recently been forced to see one of her worst memories. He told her what he could feel though, and she tested what she could with her necklace on.

It was interesting, in a way. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Michael that Maria had been more sensitive than him when they were kids. The necklace dulled her senses to something much closer to average, and he wondered how she’d never noticed the difference.

Where he saw the shadows outside shift and warp, darker than they should have been, she saw nothing at all. She didn’t hear any buzzes either. In the restaurant they were in, Alex closed his eyes and let himself open up as much as he could, and heard shadow-screams coming from upstairs, the furious sound of an arguing couple. Maria heard none of it.

They could both smell smoke though, and they both agreed that the bench they’d passed on their way in had a threatening aura. Alex had seen flickering shapes sitting on it though, while Maria hadn’t.

“Keep me updated, okay?” Maria said afterwards, hugging Alex goodbye. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

“I will.” Alex closed his eyes for a second. “If you wanna talk, you can call me, okay?”

“Back atcha.” She nodded to Michael and headed off in the direction of the Wild Pony. As soon as she was around the corner, Michael sighed and turned away, rubbing his bad hand over his face.

“You can get into Max’s laptop?” he asked after a second.

“No problem.”

“I could get you Isobel’s as well, if you need it.”

“We’ll start with Max’s and go from there.”

“Okay.” Michael swept his hat off his head and ran a hand through his hair before putting it on again. “Okay. You wanna go to your motel, or the trailer?”

“Motel. My laptop’s there, it could be useful.”

“Alright.” Michael tilted his head in the direction of the street where he’d parked his truck, and Alex followed him.

Breaking into Max’s laptop was tragically easy, and it turned up absolutely nothing. Max’s search history (which Alex made Michael sit on the other side of the room for, because no one should know their brother’s search history) had nothing that set off any warning bells at all. All he had in the way of documents were folders of photographs (mostly of the desert, but a fair few of Max’s family as well), and folders of Word documents.

Alex opened the most recently accessed and found himself sucked in a little before he made himself stop. Max had always excelled in their English classes and he’d always talked about wanting to write. In a strange way, Alex was proud of him for keeping it up.

There was a folder for household stuff that Alex skimmed through until he saw a file named _Evans, Max – Last Will and Testament_. 

Michael, looking over his shoulder, snorted. “Typical Max, to put his surname first. Think it’ll have anything interesting in it?”

“Maybe,” Alex murmured, opening it up. Michael shook his head and walked away, pacing from one end of the tiny room to the other.

“Lotta legalese. Lemme guess, he wants to donate all his books to charity, leaves the house to his parents, his car to Isobel, wants all his belongings boxed up for Goodwill –”

“He wants his estate split three ways,” Alex interrupted. “A third for his parents, a third for Isobel, and a third for you.” He looked up as Michael stopped mid-stride, expression totally unguarded for a second before he shook his head, pressing his lips together.

“His estate? What is that?”

“The sum of everything he owns, pretty much.” Alex looked down to skim the document again. “He’s very clear on giving you an equal standing with his parents and Isobel on the monetary stuff, and he’s left you a few specific things too.”

“He has?” Michael took a small step forward and stopped, like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed.

“Come and see,” Alex invited. He couldn’t imagine Max would have been angry, if he intended for Michael to be one of his beneficiaries. “Looks like it’s mostly books, but you get first pick of his bedding, kitchenware, and clothes too.”

Michael laughed, a wet, startled sound, and came over to sit on the bed beside Alex. “Fuck,” he muttered. “What the hell does he think I’d use his clothes for? Even if we were the same size, he dresses like an old man.”

Alex’s lips twitched. “I guess he figured you’d want first pick of anything potentially useful.”

“I’ve got like, five shirts, and I don’t have room for more.” Michael stood up again and sighed. “Nothing spooky, right? Just my boring brother’s junk.”

“Nothing even slightly suspicious. Well.” Alex shrugged. “Actually, he’s Googled a lot of weird stuff, but I’m pretty sure it’s all for writing purposes, so.”

Michael gave him a strange look. “Like what?”

“Like how much rain this one town in Massachusetts gets in fall,” Alex said. “And the history of the exotic snake trade on the east coast. Nothing, like, sinister.”

“What the hell kinda books is he writing?” Michael muttered, turning away again and sighing. “So we’ve got nothing.”

“Isobel’s our next stop,” Alex said, shutting Max’s laptop down. “And Noah, if we can find his laptop too.”

They went back to the Evans-Bracken house, stopping for coffee on the way, and Alex worked at the kitchen table. They couldn’t find Noah’s laptop – Alex assumed it was at his office – and Isobel’s yielded even less than Max’s had.

Michael found Tina’s phone number in Isobel’s address book (which Alex couldn’t quite believe was a thing she owned), but all they found out from her was that she’d been over on Friday as usual and hadn’t noticed anything different.

“We could be super creepy and track her down in person, but I bet she’s as mind-fucked as everyone else in this town,” Michael said bitterly, stalking from one end of Isobel’s living room to the other. “_Shit._”

Alex put Isobel’s laptop aside and twisted around on his chair to watch Michael. “Next stop: the Evanses. You haven’t actually spoken to them, right?”

“No.” Michael slowed down and shook his head. “Nah, they don’t…I’ve never even been near them without Max and Isobel.”

“I’ll talk to them then. I’ve got my shade’s ID, people sometimes treat me like a cop or something when I flash that. It’s…” He checked his watch. “Nearly five, they should be home from work pretty soon.”

“Ann Evans doesn’t work.” Michael stopped and glanced over at him. “We could go now, she’ll probably be there, unless she’s at some sorta book club or getting her nails done or something.”

Alex nodded and stood up. “Let’s go then.” He turned potential questions over in his mind as they left Isobel’s house and set off in Michael’s truck, and finally asked, “Do the Evanses know you’re Max and Isobel’s brother?”

Michael snorted. “If they know, they pretend not to. I guess it’s not like they ever would’ve remembered me from the group home though – far as they’re concerned, I moved to town when I was eleven and their kids latched onto me. No connection to any of the kids they left in the group home when they adopted Max and Isobel. We never talked about it in front of them.”

Alex didn’t think he’d ever met either of Max and Isobel’s parents – he never would have had any cause to, after all. “I think I should speak to them alone,” he said, keeping his head facing forward but his eyes on Michael to gauge his reaction.

But Michael nodded. “Yeah. They won’t talk to me, that’s why I haven’t bothered with them before. What’re you gonna say?”

“I’ll ask if she’s heard from them recently, if not, whether that’s unusual. If yes, well. That would be interesting. I’ll tell her I’m investigating a haunt at the group home she adopted them from, so I’ll ask what they were like when she first met them.”

“Mute,” Michael said shortly, eyes on the road. “We were all mute. Max and Isobel for maybe a year, me for about two.”

Alex stared at him. “Okay. Do you know why?”

“Figured they had each other to talk to, so they wanted to start speaking before I did.”

That wasn’t what Alex had meant, but it was a really sad mental image. “Right. Anything else that was weird about the three of you?”

“We came outta the desert as naked as the day we were hatched,” Michael said dryly. “Not speaking probably saved our lives – if we’d led them back to our pods, who knows what would’ve happened. There were a couple of news stories about it, pleas for information that went nowhere.” He shrugged. “A bigger news story came along pretty soon after we were found, so we sorta got eclipsed by that. Max and Isobel got snatched up pretty quick, so they can’t’ve been too weird.”

Alex nodded. “Okay. I’ll try and figure out whether she’s experiencing this…I don’t even know what to call it.”

“Mind-fucking.”

“I’m not calling it that. It’s an influence, that much is obvious, but I can’t categorise it without there being an obvious cause.”

Michael snorted. “You always so obsessed with the categories?”

“It’s part of the job,” Alex said evenly, refusing to acknowledge the little sting of embarrassment. “Can’t do all that paperwork without putting the ghost in the right category.”

“Right.” Michael gave him a sardonic look. “What does Roswell fall under?”

Alex had to laugh. “Right now? I wouldn’t even try. I’m usually dealing with one haunt at a time, and right now – I’m actually getting used to the shadows and the buzzes, and the feeling that I’m being watched everywhere I go. I’ve seen half a dozen different ghosts already, just since we started driving. I could categorise everything individually, but that would take me about a decade at the rate of population here.”

“What even are the categories?” Michael’s ever-present smirk softened into something a little more genuine, and he shot Alex a quick look out of the corner of his eye. “I know the higher up the number the worse the spook, but that’s about it.”

“Good thing you don’t pretend to be licenced,” Alex said dryly. “People love the categories.”

“Oh, I’ll bet.”

“The numbers rate individuality and corporeality, and the letters rate behaviour,” Alex told him. “Corporeal in this case meaning it’s real, for lack of a better term.”

“So like…if it can hurt you? Physically, not like a leech.”

“A poltergeist can be incorporeal and still throw you through a window,” Alex pointed out. “It’s not usually the haunt itself that’s corporeal, but it can have a corporeal effect on its surroundings. But it’s honestly a pretty nebulous term with no solid definition everyone can agree on. Like, if you see a ghost of a person and it can touch you, there’s usually no way of knowing whether it’s _actually_ touching you or if it’s just making you think it is. But if it sets a tree in your yard on fire, real fire, that’s a corporeal effect.”

“This seems like a dumb system, no offence.”

Alex smiled slightly. “The best test is whether everyone is sensing something – like seeing or smelling it or whatever – or if it’s just the sensitive people in the group. Actual corporeality is way rarer than people think, and it’s actually rare too for an incorporeal haunt to manifest with an ability to affect more than one sense. All those horror movies showing ghasts and apparitions physically attacking people are exaggerating for effect. So anyway, the categories.” He cleared his throat. “One is a single corporeal entity, two is a single incorporeal entity, three is multiple corporeal entities, four is multiple incorporeal entities, five is location-based and corporeal, and six is location-based and incorporeal.”

“Location-based?” Michael sounded like he wanted to laugh, and Alex’s lips curved up in response against his will. He vastly preferred this Michael to the sarcastic one who poked and prodded and made fun.

“Yeah, something or multiple somethings that are tied to a specific location.”

“Okay, and the letters?”

“A is actively and maliciously violent, b is incidentally violent –”

“What’s the difference?”

“A poltergeist is always maliciously violent, always out to kill or hurt you. Something like a ghast isn’t usually targeting anyone in particular, they’re just reacting to human behaviour, or a human presence. It’s like the difference between a cat playing with its food and a cat scratching you because you scared it.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Okay.”

“C is highly physically interactive with the environment, d is mildly physically interactive, e is highly sensorially interactive, and f is mildly sensorially interactive.”

“Okay…” Michael frowned. “What’s the official difference between physical and sensorial interaction?”

“Physical interaction would be throwing a chair at you, or making the pictures on the walls rattle. Sensorial interaction would be just tricking your brain into thinking those things were happening.”

“But that doesn’t count as corporeal?”

Alex shrugged. “It’s not a perfect system.”

“Weird. I mean, the categories are cute, I guess, but…I don’t know, it’s weird that they all look exactly the same to me.”

“I think it’s kind of cool,” Alex offered, and he had the surprising pleasure of seeing Michael’s entire face light up, his eyes wide as he looked across at him.

“Yeah?”

“Definitely.” It was kind of stupid how fluttery Alex was feeling, just from knowing that he’d made Michael react like that. “It actually proves the Kawamura Theory.”

“Which is?”

“The theory that all supernatural activity is on a spectrum, and it’s all using the same energy, just in different ways.”

“Duh.”

Alex snorted. “Not all of us can see electromagnetic distortions.”

Michael’s mouth twisted. “What did it look like?” he asked. “The leech?”

Alex blinked, looking at the road. “Like…like a person with an animal head covered in a white sheet, with grass growing out of its head and shoulders.”

“What the hell?”

Alex shrugged. “Some ghosts look really weird. You must’ve seen drawings.”

“Yeah, but nothing like that. What category’s a leech?”

“2-e. They never touch you, but they get in your head. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, actually.” He wasn’t looking, but he could see Michael turn his head to look at him for a second.

“Not as bad? I thought it’d paralysed you or something!”

“I always assumed a leech would throw me right into a flashback,” Alex explained, calm in the face of Michael’s incredulity. “I guess it would’ve been worse if I hadn’t been wearing salt and iron.”

“What did it do then?” Michael asked, sounding like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know.

“Just a blur of memories. Maybe it couldn’t decide which one to settle on, or it went for a compilation of the worst. They affect people differently, so it’s hard to say whether that’s normal or not.” He was not going to give Michael a snapshot tour of his most painful memories, and Michael nodded like he understood that.

He parked a street over from the Evans house, and Alex walked over on his own, observing the neighbourhood as he went. He’d never been over Max and Isobel’s house when he was a kid – he and Max had been friendly, but not friends, not like he’d been friends with Liz and Maria. The Evanses lived in a neighbourhood similar to Isobel’s, with lots of greenery despite the climate. Every house had a neatly trimmed lawn, and there were tall, leafy trees on either side of the road. 

Alex ignored the yard covered in incorporeal toads, and the ghostly tree overlaying a newly-planted sapling. It took him a second to decide that the sickly-sweet smell of chocolate on the air wasn’t real. The shadows cast by the tree out front of the Evans House were so dark that Alex didn’t want to step into them, and the place radiated hostility stronger than anything else he’d felt so far in town. He wondered what Michael would see if he looked at it. 

Thinking of Michael seemed to help. The urge to turn tail and run receded slightly, and Alex could focus on the other things haunting the house, like the flicker of something on the roof, which vanished when he looked at it properly. The buzzing of flies was getting louder too, and he held still as a buzz went right past his ear.

Some shades recited the Lord’s Prayer in a situation like this, or had chants they recited, or charms they touched for good luck. Alex just reminded himself of what it had been like to wake up alone in a hospital bed, drugged out of his mind and missing his right leg from the shin down. Nothing could ever be worse than that.

He walked up the path and pressed the doorbell, the shade under the tree freezing cold. The woman who answered a few seconds later was tall and blonde, with shiny black earrings and a big gold necklace. She was wearing a sleeveless cream blouse and high-waisted floral pants that billowed around her ankles like a skirt, and she tilted her head when she didn’t recognise him, speaking in a much deeper voice than he’d expected.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m hoping so.” Alex smiled, friendly and charming. “You probably don’t remember me, but I knew Max and Isobel in high school. Alex Manes?”

Mrs Evans’ eyes widened in delight. “Alex Manes! Of course! Oh, I recognise you now, come on in.” She stood back to let him in, and he passed her with a murmured thanks. “Come on through,” she said, leading him through the living room to the back porch where she’d apparently been reading. They had to walk through the kitchen to get there, and she got two glasses out of a cupboard. “Gosh, I can’t believe I didn’t recognise you right away.” 

Her earrings weren’t black, Alex realised as he watched her. They were silver, but so tarnished they looked black. The same thing had happened to her rings, and the gold of her necklace looked dull and dirty up close. “I used to wear a lot of eyeliner,” Alex said generously.

“Oh you did, I remember that now. And a ring through your nose, is that right?”

Considering he was pretty sure they’d never even spoken, Alex was impressed. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well you’ve certainly come a long way. What would you like to drink? I’ve got OJ, or lemonade?”

“Lemonade would be great.” Alex smiled. “Thank you.”

She gave him such a fond look that it almost threw him off-balance. They’d never spoken, but perhaps Max had talked about him at home? He couldn’t imagine Isobel ever would have, unless it was to mention what a freak he was. Or maybe Ann Evans was just this familiar with everyone. The effects of the haunting seemed diminished in her presence, and she certainly wasn’t aware of them.

“Are you in town visiting your father?” she asked as she poured them each a glass of lemonade – homemade, if the big plastic jug in the fridge was any indication. “You know, Hunter was visiting him a while back, I saw him in the grocery store.”

Gossip queen, Alex reminded himself, and kept his smile as charming as he knew how. “No, actually, I’m here on a job.”

“A job?” Her eyes sparkled. “I heard you’re a shade these days, is that true?” She inclined her head towards the open patio doors and led him outside. The back yard should have been beautiful, bursting with greenery on all sides of a large lawn with a tall tree near the back that Alex knew Max must have spent hours reading under. But all the plants in the beds were either dead or dying. The tree was flourishing in contrast, the shade cast by its leaves seeming to wilt the grass below it.

Alex tore his gaze away, feeling Mrs Evans’ eyes on him like a physical weight. “It is, yeah.”

“Fascinating work, I’m sure.” She sat down and crossed her legs elegantly, flicking her hair over her shoulder with one hand. 

“It can be,” Alex agreed, wanting to seem amiable. 

“And I suppose you wanted something interesting, after your service.” She smiled, the lines at the corners of her eyes deepening. “We all heard about your promotion, of course, to Captain.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Really?” He couldn’t imagine she’d heard it from his father.

“Oh yes, I’ve always kept up ties with the Veterans’ Centre, and obviously everyone likes to hear how our local boys are getting on. Terrible about your injury, of course,” she added seriously, and Alex was surprised to hear that she sounded like she really did care. “But you’ve done so well to keep moving forward, so to speak. Your father must be very proud, and your brothers too, of course.”

Alex’s smile turned crooked. “Ah, well. With three big brothers, it’s all been done before.”

Mrs Evans tsked. “Now don’t put yourself down, young man. Three tours for this country is more than most people give. You’re a credit to yourself, don’t think otherwise. And now you’re a shade! Now I know what most people think about the profession, and I’ve never held with it myself.”

“Is that so?” Alex had come in fully prepared to dislike the woman who had left Michael behind in foster care, but there was something oddly charismatic about her that he couldn’t help warming to, even if her house was so haunted it was making him want to scratch his own skin off. 

“Certainly. We had to call a shade out to our house when I was a child, maybe fourteen or so? A knocker, he called it.” She shuddered. “Horrible thing. Started off innocent enough, just moving things about behind our backs and dirtying the water. But then it pushed my father down the stairs, and that was the last straw.”

“Knockers are the one of the most dangerous things I get called out for,” Alex nodded. “Was your father alright?”

“A broken wrist and a concussion, nothing too serious, thank God. But I know how valuable a shade is when you need one. The one we called came in and banished the haunt out of the house in less than a day. Wonderful work.” She smiled at him and picked up her lemonade. “And you say you’re here in Roswell on job? Nothing as bad as a knocker, I hope.”

“No, not a knocker. It’s one of those cases that’s more research than action.” Alex smiled, self-deprecating and calculated. “It’s why I wanted to ask about Max and Isobel. Have you seen them lately?”

“Oh, they’re always around. I see Isobel and Noah at my bridge club every now and then, and Max around town. They’ve always been very independent, very strong-willed. They like to make their own way in the world.”

Most people would have immediately asked if they were missing, but Alex just nodded. “So when was the last time you saw them?”

“Mm, I don’t know. Maybe the fourth of July? Or, my husband’s birthday is at the beginning of August and we always have a family barbeque for that. And I see Isobel at my bridge club every now and then of course, and I see Max out and about in his uniform. They like to contribute to the community.”

“Of course,” Alex agreed, starting to get creeped out. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen them this week at all?”

She smiled and waved a hand. “Oh, I see them around every so often. Town this size, they’d have to make a real effort to avoid me, and I’m sure they’ve tried on occasion!” She laughed, and Alex’s smile became a little more strained.

“Do you ever see them on their own, Mrs Evans? I mean, do you ever go out with Isobel alone, just the two of you?”

“We love shopping together,” Mrs Evans smiled, lowering her voice as though pretending it was a secret. “Girls need time away from the boys sometimes. Isobel and I like to treat ourselves from time to time, certainly.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Oh, can’t have been too long ago,” she said breezily. “My husband’s birthday is the first week of August every year, and we always have a family dinner for that.”

Alex nodded, and decided to try a different tack. “I’m actually investigating a haunt based at the old group home on Shirley Street. That’s where you adopted Max and Isobel from, right?”

“When they were seven, yes.” Mrs Evans nodded, her smile softening a little. 

“Did they ever show signs of being haunted at all? Any strange behaviour, saying odd things, seeing things you couldn’t?”

“Oh, nothing like that.” She waved a hand. “No, they were darlings, both of them. Have you spoken to them about it at all?”

“They said they didn’t remember very much,” Alex lied. “Makes sense – I don’t remember much from that age either.”

“Mm, of course.” She frowned though, shifting in her chair. “I’m not entirely comfortable discussing my children’s start in life without them here.”

“I completely understand,” Alex assured her seriously. “It’s not them I’m interested in, specifically, it’s any children from the home itself. I just knew that was where you adopted them from, so it was an easy place to start. How many other children were there when you saw Max and Isobel for the first time, out of interest?”

“Oh, maybe four or five. It wasn’t a very big place, you know. We expected, or I thought at least, when we first considered adoption, that we would get a baby. You know, get the whole experience from day one, as it were.” Mrs Evans gave him a smile. “It was my husband who suggested we look at older children. The older they get, the harder it is to find homes for them, I understand. Initially – and they know this, so I don’t mind telling you – we only intended to adopt one. We didn’t really have the means for more, you understand.”

“Of course,” Alex nodded, and wondered how much the Evans house was worth, with its multiple bedrooms and large garden, on a street with all these other big, beautiful houses. He remembered Max and Isobel’s Jeep, and how neither of them had ever had jobs while they were in high school, and Max mentioning getting an allowance. 

“But when I saw Isobel…I knew she was mine. And where Isobel goes, so goes Max.” Mrs Evans smiled at him, proud and fond. “You know what they’re like. We couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Max behind, and Isobel never would have allowed it, so we adopted them both. They were always so attached, right from the beginning, and they’re still very close.”

“I always wished I got on that well with my brothers,” Alex told her, smiling back. It wasn’t a lie, really, and Mrs Evans could probably tell. She nodded understandingly.

“Siblings can be tricky. I used to have the most vicious fights with my sister, but at the end of the day, family’s family. And of course I imagine it’s even worse with a house full of boys. Max has always been so protective of Isobel. As she is of him, actually. They’d do anything for each other.”

“You don’t know what their lives were like before you adopted them?”

“Well, that’s between them and the system.” Mrs Evans quirked an eyebrow, and he took that as the clear warning it was and lifted his hands in surrender.

“Sorry, I keep getting side-tracked. I’ve never known any of the people involved in one of my investigations before – it makes things a little more complicated. I meant to ask about the home itself. Did anything there ever feel off to you? Any cold spots, seeing things out of the corner of your eye, standard haunting behaviour?”

Mrs Evans shook her head slowly. “No…no, nothing like that. I assume you’ve been to the place itself?”

“Yes,” Alex lied. He was seeing things out of the corner of his eye right then, as it happened, but he didn’t think mentioning it would go down well.

“Well, it used to be in better shape than that,” Mrs Evans said dryly, and shook her head again. “No, it seemed perfectly normal to me at the time.”

“And all the children living there? Were there any who were behaving strangely? Who you thought might’ve been under the influence of something?”

She hesitated, wrinkling her nose a little. “Well…no.” She sighed and flicked her fingers. “No, I don’t think so. Nothing that wouldn’t be unusual for children who haven’t been as fortunate in life as others. There was a boy who was drawing on the walls when we went there the first time, and we found out later that one of the older girls had an unhealthy obsession with fire, but none of it ever struck me as supernatural in any way. And there was never anything unusual about Max and Isobel, after they came home with us.”

“And they were always fine in school,” Alex nodded, reminding her of his connection to them. “I didn’t know Isobel so well, but Max was always friendly to me.”

Mrs Evans smiled, eyes narrowing in pleasure like a cat’s. “That’s Max. Not a mean bone in his body. Have you spoken to them since you got back to town? I don’t think I asked – how long have you been back? I haven’t seen you around at all, so not long?”

“I only got in yesterday,” he smiled. “I’ve been trying to track them down, actually. I wouldn’t ask for their addresses or phone numbers or anything like that from you though, that isn’t exactly ethical.”

Mrs Evans laughed, like he’d said something sweet, and didn’t pick up on the discrepancy of him having already told her he’d spoken to them. “Well, Max is a deputy now, so you could always try down at the station.”

“Quite the community player.” Alex kept his smile light and easy, and noticed how cold he was getting, like the temperature around him was dropping steadily. “That sounds like him. Have you seen him around lately, on patrol?”

“Oh, I see him around plenty,” she smiled, and Alex’s heart sank. It really was as Michael had described, like there was some sort of block in her mind she was repulsed from. “Can I get you another drink?”

“No thank you, I don’t want to impose on you any more than I have, especially when you’ve been so helpful.”

She was charmed, he could see. “You haven’t been an imposition in the slightest! You’ve brightened up my afternoon, if anything. But if you need to get on with your work, I don’t want to keep you.”

“Thank you,” he nodded, getting to his feet. “I mean it, you really have been helpful. I can see why Max and Isobel turned out so well.”

She laughed, and their bodies turned towards the door, hers winning the little contest to lead him out. The wind blew through the leaves of the tree in the yard, and the shadows danced, dark and twisting. “I’ll be sure to let them know you stopped by, if I see them before you do.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Should I ask them to get in contact with you?” She led him to the front door, looking over her shoulder at him, and he considered it for half a second before nodding and reaching into his inside jacket pocket.

“Yeah, that would be great, thank you.” He didn’t know why giving her his card felt like a bad idea, but he put it down to his aversion to being known to be back in Roswell. But he’d already sealed his fate there by coming to speak to Ann Evans in the first place, so refusing to give her his contact information would have been shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. “Thanks again for your time,” he said as she opened the door for him. “I really appreciate it.”

“I hope you banish whatever ghost’s been haunting the old group home,” she nodded, one hand on the door. “Best of luck to you.”

He smiled and nodded once more, and turned away to head back to the sidewalk.

There was a tall, dark shape standing in the shadow of the tree in the yard of the house directly across the street, and the smell of chocolate was thick and cloying in the air. Behind him was a looming, frightening darkness, and the heat of the sun when he finally stepped out of the shadow of the tree was searing. The Evans house, he decided as he walked back up the street, probably wasn’t any more or less haunted than all its neighbours.

He was glad of the short walk between her house and Michael’s truck. It gave him a little time to comb through everything she’d said, and wonder how much she hadn’t told him. He stopped when he turned the corner, arrested by the sight of Michael in the cab of his truck, slouched back in the seat with his chin on his chest, black hat pulled low over his face.

Alex was struck with the completely unfamiliar desire to get his phone out and take a photograph. Michael, caught unawares. Michael at rest. It was strange, seeing him so still. His memory of Michael asleep in the motel bed in Las Cruces was already fading, and Alex wanted to recapture it. He wanted – 

Michael shifted, like he was trying to get comfortable, and Alex jerked into motion again, scowling at himself. Now really wasn’t the time for stuff like that to get in his head. He had a job to do. He knocked on the truck’s hood as he reached it, alerting Michael to his presence. Michael stretched, tipping his hat back into its usual position on his head. “You weren’t long,” he said.

“You were right.” Alex climbed in and sighed. “She’s under the same influence as everyone else. And it’s really, really strong.”

“Is there a scale for that too?”

“Not really. But this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen or heard of before. It’s just too _big._” He sighed, settling on the bench and pulling the door closed. “People can only be influenced so far, and usually it’s people who are already vulnerable to it in some way.”

“Like mentally ill people?”

“Sometimes, but that’s actually way less common than people think.” Alex frowned out at the road, not looking at Michael. “It’s usually proximity and intense stress that opens people up to this sort of thing. But the most people ever influenced to perform the intended action of one haunt was a place in Italy in the seventies, and that was only twenty or so people. There are thousands of people living in Roswell. And the style of the influence is weird too.”

“What d’you mean?”

Alex scowled at him. “You’ve been a shade for six years and you’ve never seen someone under an influence?”

“Okay, sure, but I can clear it up with a handshake, remember?” Michael wiggled his good hand, irritated. “I don’t exactly sit back and watch it play out for kicks, or for research.”

“Right.” That made sense. Annoyingly. “Well, you know what people are like when they’re being pushed or possessed, right? They act weird, you can kind of tell.”

“I don’t think you can,” Michael said dryly. “I mean, I can hear it and see it, but I think if a human isn’t sensitive, they don’t usually know.”

“Fine,” Alex said, trying not to snap. “The point is, Ann Evans wasn’t acting like a normal person does under an influence. And if Max’s partner and everyone else you’ve asked was acting like that too, that’s really abnormal.”

“Like the questions were sliding right off her?” Michael asked, mouth turning down a little at the corners. “Like I said, right?”

“Yeah, exactly like you said. Like there’s something blocking the truth in her mind. And it’s subtle, that’s the really weird thing.” He gestured, trying to figure out how to articulate the strangeness of it to someone who didn’t sense the supernatural like he did. “The body usually reacts when the mind is being pushed – you try and push back, subconsciously. That’s why – in the bar, last night,” he tried, reaching for an example Michael had actually seen. “Before you got rid of whatever was pushing me. I was holding onto my beer bottle so hard it was rattling on the table, and I grabbed that charm in your hat because my body knew it would help, even if my brain was being pushed at the time.”

“Okay.” Michael nodded, touching the band of his hat where the sagebrush lay tucked under the material. “I get that.”

“But Mrs Evans was completely relaxed, like nothing was wrong at all. No sweats, no shakes, nothing in her eyes – she was totally unaware of the influence. That’s…” He shrugged with his whole body, despairing a little. “That’s just not possible, for something to influence multiple people, multiple thousands of people, like that. Getting in someone’s mind without them knowing it at all and leaving no trace behind? No haunt can do that.”

Michael’s eyes widened, and Alex felt the realisation in the air around him. He leaned forward, anticipating it, and Michael hesitated, teeth pulling at his lower lip. “Isobel can,” he said at last, and Alex blinked.

“Isobel?” he repeated, going still. That hadn’t been the revelation he’d been expecting.

“Yeah. It’s her power, getting in people’s heads.”

Alex’s mouth opened, and he closed it again so he could find the right words. “_Her_ power,” he said in a low voice, leaning away again. He’d assumed Max and Isobel had the same abilities as Michael, but he realised that he hadn’t actually confirmed that out loud. And Michael hadn’t volunteered the information. “What do you mean, her power?”

“We each have a different ability.” Michael turned forward again, ducking his head. “Didn’t realise I hadn’t told you.”

“Bullshit.”

Michael rubbed his eyes with his good hand. “Okay. Yeah, I held back on that. They’re already gonna be so mad I’ve told you all this, I thought…I don’t know. I didn’t wanna tell you everything, I didn’t think it’d matter to hold that back.”

Alex took a deep breath and kept his voice very even when he spoke. “Everything matters, Guerin. If they’re at the centre of this haunting, any detail might be useful. And I’d say that the two of them having specific alien abilities would have been pretty useful to know!”

“We don’t tell people!” Michael snarled at him, eyes furious and dark under the brim of his hat. “We _never_ tell people, that’s the one thing we’ve always agreed on, no matter what happens!”

“Well it’s too late now!” Alex snapped back, raising his voice. “You already told me what you are! You might as well tell me everything, if you want me to be able to help to the best of my ability!”

“And what if I can’t trust you?” Michael hissed. “What if you change your mind and start running your mouth?” Alex turned away and opened the door. Before he could slide out, Michael grabbed his arm, grip loose. “What’re you doing?”

Alex couldn’t figure out if he sounded scared or angry, but he yanked his arm away anyway. “Taking a walk,” he said in a hard voice. “You can meet me at the motel in an hour if you still want my help on this, but I don’t want to see you before then, understand?” He didn’t wait for a reply. He got out of the cab and slammed the door without looking back at Michael, walking away with his hands shoved in his pockets.

He didn’t know why he was even surprised. Of course Michael would have held information back. Of course he didn’t trust Alex. It made sense. He’d spent his whole life in hiding, it made sense that he didn’t trust easily. It had been stupid for Alex to think he was any different than any of the other people in Michael’s life. 

He headed south and found Cahoon Park almost immediately. The highway his motel was on was only a couple of streets further, so he walked around the park a couple of times instead of heading straight there, irrationally angry at how close together everything was. Roswell was so small, it felt like it was pressing around him already, and he’d barely been back a single day. And that was without the grating pressure of the haunts all around him, the feeling that he was being watched edging into something like paranoia. 

He’d had the option to be stationed on the base nearby after he’d lost his foot. He’d seriously considered it, tempted for the first time to flee to something he knew, a bolthole where he could lick his wounds. He’d lost three friends in the explosion that had blown off his foot, and he’d been in shock. He couldn’t really remember the first couple of months of his recovery. If he hadn’t mentioned Roswell to the therapist he’d been forced to see, if she hadn’t asked him about his happy memories of the town, he might have come back.

The idea made him feel sick now. It was proof, he’d told Dr Layman a few weeks after she’d asked him for happy memories and he hadn’t been able to think of any on the spot, that he’d been really messed up. Willingly returning to the town that had made him feel so trapped and helpless as a teenager, knowing his father was still in a position of authority? It would have been the stupidest move of his life, after bringing Michael back to the tool shed that day.

He made his poorest decisions for himself when they were impulsive. He was his own blind spot.

He felt like such an idiot. What had he thought, that Michael Guerin would want him as more than a means to an end? The thought finally occurred to him that Michael was using him, taking advantage of Alex’s obvious feelings for him to enlist his assistance in finding his siblings. That it had taken him this long to even think of that was actually frightening. He was usually so much sharper than this.

It really was pathetic. Half an hour of flirting and he was ready to jump into bed with Michael Guerin. A few rounds of sex and he was ready to drive across the state and back to the site of his hellish childhood, for Michael fucking Guerin. Michael was a smart man, and he was obviously devoted to Max and Isobel above everything else in his life. 

It made sense that he would come and find Alex, who quite rightly felt guilty as hell for what he’d done to Michael. It made sense that Alex would be so easily manipulated; he was weak, and it made sense that Michael would be able to see it, would look at him and know exactly what to say and do. Made sense, that Michael would be able to kiss him in just the right way to get Alex to forget all rational thought, make him completely stupid.

Alex felt something on his cheek and stopped where he was, frozen in place.

“Right,” he muttered, the feeling of being watched only increasing his mortification. “Right. Okay.” He wiped the tears off his face as quickly as possible and started walking again, not really looking where he was going. The push wasn’t as strong as the one he’d felt at the Wild Pony the night before, but it was still deeply unpleasant.

What made sense and what didn’t? How the hell was he supposed to tell when any strong emotions he felt could be hijacked by any haunt he happened to be walking past? 

Michael had told him just that morning that what Alex wanted had always mattered to him, and Alex wanted to believe that. If he gave it more than even a passing thought, just the idea of it made his heart hurt. But how was he supposed to trust Michael, knowing he was holding back information, knowing that his priority was Max and Isobel?

Because that was how it should be. Alex let out a long breath and held that thought. _That_ was what made sense. Michael was putting his family first, and that was fine. Alex wouldn’t begrudge him that, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Maybe Michael really did like him, maybe he didn’t, but either way, Alex could handle it.

His chest ached, and he told himself to ignore it.

He walked around the park five times before heading to the motel, calmer than when he’d arrived. It did make sense. It sucked, and it hurt, and it was stupid that it hurt at all, but it made sense. Michael trusted two people in the whole world, and it made perfect sense that Alex wasn’t included in that tiny circle. They barely knew each other. They’d connected in high school for a brief, intense period, that was all. Alex had no right to Michael’s secrets. He had no right to expect them from him.

Michael was already at the motel when Alex got there, his truck almost tragically shabby compared to the other vehicles in the parking lot. Alex went over and tapped on the hood again, like knocking on someone’s door, and waited for Michael’s nod before opening the door and climbing in.

“So are either of them telekinetic?” he asked right out, hoping to skip over any apologies or awkwardness. It was the correct approach – he literally saw the tension bleed out of Michael’s body at the question.

“No, just me.” Michael twisted to face him properly on the bench. “Max has a little power over electricity, but not in a way he can control – stuff like lights flickering when he gets angry. He used to blow out his house’s power every time he had a wet dream when he was a kid.”

Alex scowled. “His mom is such a liar. She said right to my face that they were both totally normal kids after they were adopted.”

“What, you’re shocked she didn’t wanna tell you about her private life?” Michael snorted. “Please. Ann Evans collects secrets; she doesn’t go spreading her own.”

Alex huffed. “What about Isobel then?”

“I haven’t finished about Max yet.” Michael looked down at his hands. “His real power is healing. It drains him real bad, but he can heal any physical wound, we think. He fixed Isobel’s arm when she broke it in high school, and he’s healed things for me before. Doesn’t seem to work for more complicated stuff, but cuts, bruises, breaks, that’s all in his wheelhouse.”

Alex took a second to absorb that, reading between the lines. How many cuts, bruises, and breaks of Michael’s had Max healed? He knew Michael wouldn’t react well to further questions on that, so he asked, “What do you mean by more complicated?”

“He can’t cure sleep deprivation,” Michael said dryly. “Or panic attacks. It’s like the brain’s too complex for his healing hands or something.”

“Okay.” Max was a healer, sure. Sure. Alex could handle that. He nodded. “And Isobel?”

“She can get in people’s heads.” Michael looked down again. “She can…it’s not…it sounds bad, okay, but it isn’t…she’s never used it for anything serious, and she can’t make people do anything they really don’t want to.”

A definite chill went down Alex’s spine. “You’re gonna need to explain that a little better, Guerin.”

Michael gave him a defiant look. “She can influence people, okay? She can get in their heads and push them, suggest they do something and make them do it. And she can read their minds, see whatever she wants to.”

“Right.” Alex exhaled slowly, controlled. “You know that’s objectively horrifying, right?”

“She can’t make people do anything they don’t want to,” Michael argued, a note of desperation and anger in his voice. “She’s not a bad person, okay? She’s never used it against anyone for anything serious, I don’t think she’s done it at all since high school. She only ever used it to get out of doing her homework, and she was just a kid. She’s not a saint, so what? She’s –”

“She’s your sister,” Alex interrupted. “I get it.”

Michael turned to face the wheel again, expression tight. “You don’t know her like I do,” he said eventually. “I know her power sounds bad, but she doesn’t use it.”

That Michael knew of, anyway. Alex didn’t want to say it out loud – he had the feeling that Michael would react badly.

“Has she ever influenced more than one person?” he asked instead. 

“Yeah.” Michael rubbed his left hand, massaging his palm with his thumb in an absent, habitual way. “Couple times.”

“What’s the biggest number of people she’s influenced?”

“Seven.”

“What happened?”

The muscle in Michael’s jaw twitched, and for a second Alex didn’t think he’d answer, but then he opened his mouth. “You remember Jade Tilney, in eighth grade?”

“Vaguely,” Alex lied. She’d been a bully in middle school, and he’d been glad to have almost no classes with her when they’d all moved onto high school. If he hadn’t had Kyle back then, he had no doubt that Jade would have targeted him. 

“Isobel made her and her friends leave me alone.”

The impulse to ask what they’d done pushed at Alex’s tongue, but he held it back. He remembered what Jade had been like. Her favourite tactic had been humiliating people, and Michael Guerin, with his shabby clothes and cheap books and free school lunches would have had a lot to make fun of. Alex nodded instead. “And they never bothered you again?”

“Pretty much. Isobel made them want to leave me alone, so they did.” Michael shrugged, and shot him a hard look, like he was daring Alex to say Isobel had been wrong to do it.

Tactically speaking, it was a good story. Bullied kids were easy to sympathise with, as were knight-in-shining-armour siblings. If it was calculated, it was very well done. Alex looked forward again and nodded. “Do you think she could influence a whole town?”

“No way.” The certainty in Michael’s voice sounded real. “She didn’t say it, but I could tell it was hard for her to push Jade and her friends when we were kids.”

“You were kids,” Alex agreed, glancing at him. “She’s an adult now.”

“But she hasn’t been practicing or anything. And look, even if she had, you said it yourself – there’s thousands of people living in Roswell. There’s no way she’d be able to get inside all of their heads, she says it’s tiring enough going in just one.”

Alex nodded, thinking about it. “You know you all have haunting powers?”

Michael took his hat off and put it on the bench between them so he could drag his other hand through his hair. “It hasn’t escaped my notice. I don’t know what to tell you; I don’t know anything about where we come from.”

So he’d said yesterday, while showing Alex the contents of his bunker. It felt like it had been a week ago. “Okay,” he muttered. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Michael repeated, one eyebrow raised, a note of sarcasm in his voice that Alex refused to be baited by. 

“Yeah.” Alex took a deep breath and looked at him. “If you have any more information you’ve been holding back, now would be a good time to share it.”

Michael shook his head. “That’s it.”

Alex didn’t believe him, but he nodded anyway, feeling like a fool. “Fine. What now?”

A look of brief panic flashed through Michael’s eyes, and he looked forward again. “I don’t…she didn’t tell you anything useful? Mrs Evans?”

“Not really.” Alex considered the problem, frowning at the dashboard. If this was a normal job, what would he do? “Did Max and Isobel have any enemies?” he asked, feeling like he was intimidating a detective on a TV show. 

Michael laughed, bleak and empty. “No. They fly under the radar, y’know? They blend in. They’ve never done anything anyone would curse them for, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Alex needed a different approach. “You said you’d figured out the boundaries of this mass haunting.”

“Yeah?”

“Show me.”

Michael didn’t make him ask twice. He turned over the truck engine and put it in gear, and drove them out of the motel parking lot.

Alex let his vision blur as Michael drove, not wanting to see the too-dark shadows or the other little haunts they were passing on the road. In truth, he didn’t think seeing the boundaries of the haunting would help, and he didn’t think Michael believed it would either, but he needed the time to come up with something better. 

If this was a normal job, what would he do? How would he approach it?

Dig into the history of the afflicted, but he was already doing that. Research the history of the town, but Michael had filled him in very comprehensively yesterday, and nothing had jumped out. Figure out the source, but he was pretty sure Michael was right, and the source was Max and Isobel.

Max and Isobel saw haunts as distortions in the electromagnetic field and could disperse them as easily as Michael had destroyed that leech this morning. So it seemed unlikely that they had been taken by something supernatural. Which left normal methods of abduction, but there had been no signs of struggle. So perhaps it had been someone they knew?

Or multiple someones. A group. An organised strike. And what possible reason could anyone have for striking against Max and Isobel Evans? And Noah, something about that was still niggling at Alex. Noah was human, but he’d been caught up in the same disappearance. And the three pods had been taken too.

“Who could have found out what you are?” he muttered.

“What?”

“Just thinking. Someone who guessed, or figured out, what Max and Isobel are without linking you to them, linking Noah instead as the third alien. Who would have figured it out and reacted badly?”

“What d’you mean, reacted badly?” Michael asked, a little wild.

“I mean reacted by abducting them,” Alex said dryly. “That’s a pretty big reach.” The answer was there, and he didn’t want to think of it, he didn’t want to say it out loud. It had been percolating in his mind since that morning, when he’d seen his father drive past. “Especially since it requires pretty extensive resources too. But we have to assume it was someone they know.”

“The lack of struggle?”

“Yeah. Even if there was a struggle, the way everything’s been made to look like there wasn’t indicates someone familiar with the space your siblings were taken from. I wish I’d stayed longer at the Evanses,” he added, frowning. “I should’ve met Mr Evans.”

“He comes home late, you would’a been there hours,” Michael said shortly.

“How do you know that?”

“Cased their house before I came and found you, remember? And the Evanses have been having marital problems for years now, but they’re both way too proud to divorce and admit it. That and they’d have to divide up their assets, and they’d probably hate that. I bet you Mrs Evans has a good pre-nup that means she’d walk away with a huge chunk of Mr Evans’ money, and he doesn’t wanna do that.”

“You know this much about every family in Roswell?” Alex asked.

“No.”

Only the one that could have been his, in another life, Alex translated. Only the one that his siblings belonged to.

“You’re sure they don’t know Max and Isobel are aliens?”

“Pretty sure they would’ve said something by now if they did.”

“Unless they were waiting for Max and Isobel to tell them.” But that was the act of a loving parent who wanted to give their child agency. He couldn’t help thinking of his dad, and the way he’d started treating Alex differently before Alex himself had figured out why.

“You saying the Evanses kidnapped their kids?” Michael asked incredulously.

Alex didn’t want to think about his father, and he shoved the memories away. “It fits a few of the boxes, but I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I want to speak to Mimi.”

“Mimi DeLuca?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Michael said, irritated when Alex didn’t expand on that. “_Why_ do you want to speak to Mimi DeLuca?”

“She’s got a better sensitivity than me or Maria, and I think it could be useful.”

“How?” Michael glanced at him, frowning. “You don’t think it’d be just more of this morning’s mess?”

“Did you ever talk to Mimi, at all? Before you kind of took over being the local shade?”

“You admit she’s a shade now?” Michael snorted when Alex just gave him an unimpressed look. “Nah, not really. I didn’t really start hanging out at the Pony regularly till after Maria took over.”

Alex wanted to ask what he’d done in the intervening years, how he’d spent his time, who he’d spent it with. He wanted to know it all, but it wasn’t relevant to the job, and he didn’t know how or if Michael would answer, so he just nodded. “She’s much stronger than Maria and me. You’ve seen Maria do her psychic stuff?”

“Oh sure, she’ll swindle anyone for a bit of extra cash. I like that about her.”

Alex pressed his lips together. “Right. Well, I don’t know how much of it is real when Maria does it, but Mimi really has a gift. She can read people, for real. I don’t know if Maria will let us see her, but I think it might be a good idea.”

“Alright.” Michael fell into silence, and Alex sat next to him and gave up trying to figure out how to fill it after a while. After about ten minutes, it started to feel normal, less strained, and Alex remembered wishing for this sort of quiet from every person he’d ever been partnered with since deciding to be a shade, and from most of the airmen he’d travelled with too. The ability to just sit in silence without making things uncomfortable wasn’t something many people had, it seemed.

He wondered what it would be like, if Michael was his actual partner. As a shade, of course, not as anything else. 

He could imagine it. He could imagine picking up food at gas stations and introducing themselves to clients. Shades didn’t tend to have dress codes, so Michael could keep his cowboy look. To clients, it would look like Michael was the hitter and Alex the researcher, but they would be good at both. Michael was clearly no stranger to digging for information, and frankly Alex couldn’t imagine he would be better in a fight than he was, even with his prosthetic leg. Michael might be decent in a bar fight, Alex didn’t know, but he hadn’t had any actual combat training.

It was a stupid fantasy, one that had no hope of ever coming to pass, and Alex closed his eyes and reminded himself to focus on the job.

They drove around the perimeter of the town, and went to the Wild Pony afterwards. Maria wasn’t a fan of the idea Alex proposed, of course. “She probably won’t even recognise you,” she said in a low, hard voice, wiping down the bar and shooting Alex a glare every time she looked up. “It’ll be a waste of time.”

“Anything might help. Please, Maria.” He leaned forward. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.” Michael was in the restroom, but Alex still lowered his voice. “I don’t know where next to go with this, and Michael doesn’t either. Mimi’s always been more sensitive than either of us. Any information could be helpful at this point.”

Maria frowned, and looked around as Michael emerged from the door that led to the men’s. “Fine,” she said shortly. “But if she freaks out, if she gets upset for even a second, you’re outta there. And you have to be at Sunset Mesa tomorrow at nine on the dot.”

“Thank you,” Alex said, and Michael came up to stand next to him and put his hat on the bar.

“I owe you, DeLuca.”

“Please.” She snorted, lips turning up at the corners like she was trying to suppress a smile and not quite managing it. “You haven’t been outta my debt since the day you walked in and I let you stay.”

“Don’t I know it.” The fingers of Michael’s good hand drummed restlessly on the bar top, and Alex and Maria’s eyes met for a split second of shared worry. It was so unexpected and intimate that Alex ducked his head to escape it.

“Have a game,” Maria said, getting two beers out and putting them on the bar. “Make the place seem a little more lively for me. Unless you’ve got anything more pressing to do this evening?”

“I guess we don’t.” Michael sighed, and Alex looked up in time for him to give Maria a smirk, empty of cheer, and then turn it on Alex. “You any good at pool?”

“I guess you’ll find out,” Alex said reflexively, and wished he could unsee Maria’s grin behind Michael’s laugh.

“Alright, shade, bring it.”

Michael was very good. Alex wished almost immediately that he hadn’t let him break, because he sank five balls in quick succession, and he made it look like the easiest thing in the world. “Conservative estimate,” he said, when Michael finally gestured for him to have his turn with a smug grin. “How much time have you spent playing pool over the last thirteen years?”

“Couldn’t tell you.” Michael leaned his hip against the table, and Alex pretended very hard not to look at him. “It kinda goes hand in hand with drinking, so past a certain point, it all goes fuzzy.”

“A long time though,” Alex said, leaning down to take a shot. He could feel Michael watching him, and tried to ignore it. 

“Longer than you, by the look of it,” Michael said dryly.

Alex lined up his shot, paused to give Michael a wry look, and sank a ball neatly. He had to walk past Michael to take another shot, and refused to react to his laugh.

It wasn’t a long game by any stretch of the imagination, and Michael won, so they played again, and Alex agreed when Michael suggested best three out of five. None of those games were long either, and Alex lost every single one.

“You’re better than I expected?” Michael offered, grinning like a Cheshire cat as Alex finished his beer.

“Thanks, Guerin, that’s a real comfort to me.” He rolled his eyes and turned away to hide his own smile. It hurt, how normal it felt, how easy it was to do this. He put the pool cue down on the table and turned back to Michael, making a split-second decision that he was pretty sure he would regret. “You hungry?”

“I could eat.” His grin shrank to a smirk, eyes a little hooded. “Gonna head back to your room again? I’ll hold down the fort here, don’t worry.”

If Alex hadn’t shared that worried look with Maria earlier, he might have pushed back, irritation winning out over rationality. But he saw her look over at them from behind the bar, and he shook his head. It took a second for him to figure out what he wanted to say, but Michael waited. He wore a look of such amused contempt that Alex had to breathe through the urge to snap at him. What right did Michael have to expect anything from him? 

He found that he couldn’t bring himself to ask Michael if he wanted to eat with him, not even to press at his own bruises, so he just nodded. “Fine. Enjoy that.” He gave Michael an expressionless look and turned away again, going back to the bar to leave his empty bottle there. It was safer to just walk away.

Maria frowned at him, sliding over to take it before he could even set it down. “You good?”

“Yeah, just tired.” He gave her a small smile that she didn’t return. She tipped her chin in Michael’s direction and raised an eyebrow.

“You talked to him yet?”

“No.” He lifted a hand to stall anything else she might have said. “And I’m not going to, not tonight at least. I’ll see tomorrow, okay?”

“Fine.” She put the bottle aside and beckoned him in, and they hugged over the bar. “Get some sleep, Alex.”

“I’ll try.” He gave her one last smile and headed out, keeping his eyes averted from Michael’s figure by the pool tables, pool cue still held in his hand.

The motel room felt smaller and emptier when Alex got back to it. He had no idea whether he’d made the right decision by coming back on his own rather than inviting Michael back or going with him to the junkyard. He didn’t know Michael, that was the problem. He just wanted him.

He ordered fried chicken, and ate it in the parking lot so it wouldn’t stink out his room. The motel was behind him, the highway out front, the car dealerships across the road. Every time he looked up from his food everything seemed slightly different, and it was a jolt every time, even if it did resolve itself into familiarity when he stared it down. He felt as though the town was moving under him, as if he was seeing himself from a bird’s eye view and the bench he sat on was the only fixed point.

Everything around him felt like it was shifting, the streets twisting off their grids, the buildings growing, shrinking, expanding in the wrong directions. Alex ate faster, trying not to feel embarrassed by his invisible observer – who wasn’t real, he reminded himself. There wasn’t actually anybody watching him. It was just that small-town feeling of being observed magnified by the haunting.

He felt slightly sick when he went inside, having eaten far too fast. The paranoia was growing, and it was like trying not to scratch an itch. Alex touched his iron bracelets, but it didn’t help. He stood in the centre of his room and counted backwards from twenty, and it didn’t help. He gave in and started checking the room for bugs and cameras, and while that should have made him feel better, it only made him feel worse, and he knew as he was doing it that it was only making him feel worse, but now he’d started, he couldn’t stop.

He managed to get a grip before he did something truly stupid, like smashing the lightbulbs to check there was nothing hidden inside them, and forced himself to sit down on the floor and stay still for a bit. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t help either, and he kept having to brace himself through prickling waves of humiliation that he’d allowed himself to be haunted so easily, and he hadn’t even found anything. 

He just felt so _stupid_ and uncertain of himself. Like a kid again. Fucking Roswell, fucking him up.

He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He needed to be able to stop thinking for a bit, but it was still so early, there was no way he was going to be able to sleep. And even if it had been late, he doubted he would have been able to lie down in the dark and not freak out even more.

It was like the haunted house in Tacna, Arizona last year. He’d still been working with Glen, and Alex had volunteered to sleep in the house while Glen watched from outside. It had been horrible, and he hadn’t been able to come close to drifting off. That was the effect of being the sole focus of several lifetime’s worth of human suffering though, and he still wasn’t sure what was happening in Roswell.

Alex pulled his phone out and started reading through the notes he’d made, hoping that if he focused on the job he would stop feeling quite so haunted.

Max, Isobel, and Noah had vanished between Tuesday 17th and Friday 20th, most likely on Thursday night, since Maria noticed the haunt activity jump up on Friday. Michael had gotten back to town on Friday afternoon, and come to find Alex on the Tuesday after. They’d both come back to Roswell on Wednesday, and now it was Thursday. Exactly a week since Noah and the Evans twins had disappeared. Along with the pods.

The screen of his phone went dark while he thought about that. Michael hadn’t really described the pods in any detail, but to contain a child each, they had to be quite large. Alex opened his phone again and hesitated. It went dark, and he opened it, and went to his contacts page. And let it go dark again.

He made a sound of disgust and forced himself to find Michael’s name, which in his phone was only down as Guerin, and steeled himself for a second before hitting call. All of his nerves shrieked at him to cancel it as soon as he’d done it, and he couldn’t tell whether that was his own instincts at work or the haunt trying to keep him isolated.

The phone rang four times, and Alex was on the verge of cancelling the call when Michael finally picked up. “Alex?”

“Hey.” Jesus, he was out of breath, how had that happened? Alex swallowed and pressed his free hand to his neck, finding his pulse. He wasn’t surprised to feel how fast it was going. “Are you good to drive?” he asked, trying to be quick.

“Sure, why? You okay?”

“Can you come and get me?”

“You at the motel?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be there in ten.” Michael hung up, and Alex put his phone down on the floor by his knee and leaned forward until his forehead was touching the thin carpet. Hygienic? Probably not, but it was grounding. For about two seconds before he started freaking out about not being able to see his surroundings.

He checked the time on his phone – 19:12 – and then checked the time of the call he’d had with Michael. It had ended at 19:12, so he could expect Michael at 19:22. 

“Get up,” he muttered to himself, and shoved himself to his feet. He felt sick and overfull, and so exposed, like he was standing in the middle of a football stadium with all the lights on him, the stands packed with silent watchers judging his every move. And if he moved wrong, they would fall on him like beasts and tear him to pieces.

He was breathing too fast again, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and set a timer to go off in seven minutes. It was just a haunt. It was just a haunt, he’d dealt with this before, he could deal with it now.

He pressed his fingernails into the pad of his thumb in time with the flashing numbers on his phone screen. The protection oil he’d painted onto them that morning had probably worn off by now, he figured, and he went and got the bottle from his bag to redo them. The oil was mixed into a thin substance that dried on, like nail polish but far thinner and less chemical smelling. It helped, painting the oil mixture onto his nails, and he pulled up his right pants leg and painted a protection sigil on the metal of his prosthetic leg as well.

He sat down on the edge of the bed again and tried to count his breaths back to steadiness. The watched feeling was still there, pressing and pressing at him, and the room seemed darker. The shadows under the desk were too dark, and Alex accepted and breathed through the flutter of panic when he noticed. The shadows hadn’t been like that inside any of the buildings he’d been to so far, only outside. Was the haunt getting stronger, or was he just being pushed harder? And if this was being pushed hard, what would it be like if he wasn’t wearing salt and iron?

The urge to take his bracelets off and find out nudged at him, and he snorted and rubbed his fingers along the rough metal. That helped, reminding him that his thoughts weren’t entirely rational right now. “As if this town didn’t haunt me enough already,” he muttered, not sure who or what he was addressing. The light above the desk flickered, and he flinched. “Fuck off.”

The timer dinged on his phone, and he got to his feet in relief. He doubted sitting outside would be any less unpleasant, but the room was starting to feel so small now, he was actually afraid for a second that the door wouldn’t open. It did though, and he hurried outside to sit on the bench he’d eaten his chicken on.

Michael’s truck pulled into the lot just before he sat down, and Alex let out a sigh of relief he hoped wasn’t visible as he went over and yanked open the door with more force than it needed. “Hi.”

“Hey.” Michael’s skin was golden-orange in the evening light, and he frowned at Alex, bad hand still on the wheel. “What’s up?”

“I just…realised I hadn’t seen the cave where you said your pods were, and I wanted to do that today. It’s still early, so.”

“Sure.” Michael looked forward and drove in a big circle round the lot before pulling out onto the road. 

Michael should have been mad, or at least annoyed. Alex knew his actions were all over the place from an outside point of view, but Michael didn’t even comment on it, and that meant that Alex didn’t feel like he could bring it up. 

They drove out on the 380, the same way they’d come into town, and Alex’s breath caught as they passed the Relief Route. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Michael looked over at him sharply, squinting against the setting sun.

“That was the boundary.” Alex slumped forward a little bit, lightness zinging through his veins, beautiful calm washing over him. “Wow.”

“You can feel that?”

“I can’t believe you can’t.” Alex touched his chest, pressing his fingers to his heart for a second before finding his pulse in his neck. Slow and steady, like his mind now they were out of Roswell. “God.” He felt like himself again, and he had to hold back a laugh of pure relief.

“What’s it feel like?” Michael asked him, frowning again.

“Being haunted?”

“Being haunted in Roswell.”

“It’s different for different people,” Alex stalled.

“Sure, but what’s it like for you? I’ve never felt haunted, remember?”

Alex nodded, thinking. If they’d still been in the town, the embarrassment and sense of scrutiny would have been overpowering, he could tell that now. He wouldn’t have been able to talk about it without getting his hackles up. “For me, the feeling of being watched has increased the longer I’ve been there. Being watched and…and judged, and found wanting.”

Michael frowned, brows heavy, and pulled the sun visor down. “You’ve been feeling that the whole time? Since we got in yesterday?”

“Pretty much. It’s been getting stronger today. The unfamiliarity’s been getting worse too, and the hostility.”

“Sounds nasty.”

“It is.” Alex shook his head and rolled up his sleeves to take off the heavy iron bracelets for a bit. “And I’ve been wearing protection all day. Maria’s necklace must be incredibly powerful, to be shielding her so well. I kinda want to people-watch for a bit, maybe tomorrow, just to see how people are acting. I think the Pony’s protected, so people aren’t acting so haunted in there, but other places might be different.”

“Will it help us find Max and Isobel?” Michael asked sharply, and Alex reached up to pull down his own sun visor so he didn’t have to keep squinting. 

“There might be a pattern. Maybe everyone’s feeling watched and judged. Did Max and Isobel ever talk about feeling that way to you?”

Michael barked a laugh. “We’re aliens in hiding, Alex. We’re all worried about being watched, and we judge ourselves on how human we act all the time. Those two more than me, I guess. And it was worse when we were kids.”

“We should swing by the high school tomorrow,” Alex decided, getting his phone out to make a note of it. “See if that’s haunted or blank like their houses.”

“You think they’re at the school?”

“I think we should go through the places that are important to them. Maybe something influenced them to hide themselves.”

“I’ve been to all the places they might be,” Michael reminded him. “It’s not like there’s a lotta options in a town as small as Roswell.”

“Remind me where you’ve checked again, I wanna write them down.”

“Their houses,” Michael started. “Noah’s office, town hall where Izzy works sometimes, the station house, the Crashdown –”

“The Crashdown?”

“Max had a crush on Liz Ortecho when we were kids,” Michael shrugged. “He still goes there for coffee pretty much every day.”

“God, I forgot that.” Alex shook his head. “Okay, where else?”

“The library, the whole town centre. Got a bit desperate at that point and checked the drive-in and the sports field out back of Roswell High, cause we used to hang out there a lot when we were kids. If either of them have any other special places, I couldn’t think of them.”

“Where did Noah propose to Isobel?”

“Her place at the time. She was in an apartment on Stanton, but she didn’t like it that much. Her house now, that’s her home, that’s the place she invested her time and energy into.”

“Okay. How far away is this cave?”

“While further. Maybe half an hour?”

“Cool.” Alex settled back against the bench and sighed. “Feels good to be out of town.”

“You look different.” Michael glanced at him quickly, then back to the road. “More relaxed, I guess.”

“Yeah, I feel it.” Alex snorted and shook his head. “I always said Roswell sucked the life out of me.”

“Not all your memories of it were bad though, right?”

Michael’s voice was light, casual, and Alex looked at him, his face in profile. The stubble on his jaw and neck was thicker than it had been yesterday, and Alex couldn’t tell if there really were shadows under his eyes or if that was just from the shade of the sun visor. “No,” he agreed. “Just most. What about you?” he added. “Was anything else worth the crash landing?”

Michael looked over at him with the hint of a smile playing at his lips. Alex held his gaze until he looked back at the road, smile turning into a smirk. “Apart from you, you mean?”

Alex couldn’t reply, suddenly worried he shouldn’t have said anything, or shouldn’t have phrased it like that. He still didn’t know what they were doing, though at least they were out of Roswell he wasn’t feeling quite so paranoid about it.

Michael snorted, apparently amused by his silence. “There were a few other good times. Mostly in school, to be honest, which is pretty sad. Who wants their life to peak that early, right?”

“I don’t think you peaked in high school,” Alex told him.

“No?”

Alex shrugged. “You clearly haven’t been sitting around doing nothing. You said how long it took you to get all that stuff you’ve got in your bunker, and you’ve been studying stuff like astrophysics in your spare time. It’s not like that’s nothing, Guerin. Most people can’t even take a college course in their free time, or learn a language.”

“S’not like I can shout about it though.” Michael said. “People look at me and see a screw-up.”

“Well fuck them.” Alex frowned, a little embarrassed by his own reaction. He wanted to ask Michael what they were doing. He wanted to continue what they’d started that morning at the junkyard, asking each other what they wanted. Neither of them had given a solid answer, and as the quiet settled between them in the cab, Alex tried to figure out what he would say if Michael asked him again.

It was easier to think out here in the desert, the sunset painting the whole sky in pinks and oranges, gold-edged clouds glowing on the horizon too bright to look at directly. The earth burned beneath it, the shadow of it dark in a way that was completely unhaunted. The scrub and hills were a familiar carpet that Alex knew well, had known his whole life, maybe even longer. 

He didn’t often think of his mother and the side of his family he’d never had the chance to know as a kid, and never been brave enough to approach as an adult. But every now and then it felt good just to know it existed, that his connection to the land ran back further than most. He belonged here. 

The sun seemed to sit on the ridge of the Sierra Blanca mountains for a long time before slipping below them, the clouds above it turning a deep, deep red shading into dusky blue. Michael turned off the highway onto a dirt path Alex hadn’t even seen, heading northwest into the desert, and the truck rolled easily over the bumpier ground.

What did he want?

The last big goal he felt like he’d had was for his recovery after losing his foot. And as for hopes and dreams, he hadn’t let himself have those since he was a kid wishing he could run away from home and join a band. Wishing he could run away with Michael, for the tiny window of time he’d allowed himself to dream about it.

He’d thought about it after they’d had sex for the first time in the tool shed. They hadn’t been able to stop kissing, before, during, or after, and they’d stretched out on the pallet bed and pressed their bodies as close together as they could manage. From ankle to mouth, connected at every point they could be, and Alex had been amazed. He’d wanted to stay there forever, wanted to keep Michael close forever. He couldn’t remember ever wanting anything so much in his whole life, before or since.

Did he still want that?

He slid his gaze sideways, watching Michael as he drove. 

There was no point pretending to himself that he didn’t. He just had to be more realistic now. Everything was more complicated, for so many reasons. What would it look like, if he told Michael he wanted to keep him? If he told Michael he wanted to be kept in return?

There were too many obstacles. Alex looked forward again and closed his eyes. Even if they found Max and Isobel and Noah, Michael wouldn’t ever leave them by leaving Roswell. Alex would have to be the one to stay, and the idea of staying in Roswell filled him with dread. Even if it hadn’t been haunted to fuck, it would be a nightmare, with the threat of his father lurking so close by. The whole reason he’d never come back was to stay away from his family, and if he did settle in Roswell, what would happen then? Would his father leave them alone, or would he go after Michael?

And that was even assuming that Michael wanted him the way Alex did. It was easy for Maria to say, ‘talk to him’, but when that talk might not go the way Alex wanted it to, it was too much of a risk. They had to save their own issues for after finding Michael’s family. Besides, it was probably a dick move to ask Michael to make any serious decisions while Max and Isobel were missing. If it was a serious decision for him. But just in case it was, probably better to keep a lid on it for now.

“Hold on,” Michael said after a while. “It’s about to get a bit bumpy.”

Alex braced himself against the door as Michael turned the truck off the already bumpy path and down an arroyo that twisted out of sight. The headlights illuminated the way only a little, but it levelled out fairly soon, taking them up a slope. An ancient, abandoned cart appeared in the gloom, and Michael stopped his truck behind it. “Okay, we’re here.”

Alex raised his eyebrows, but got out of the truck. “If you’ve brought me all the way out here to kill me, Guerin, I’m going to be so pissed.”

“Aw, have a little more faith,” Michael drawled, leading the way further up the slope. Alex got his phone out to use the torch, his other arm outstretched in case his prosthesis caught on something unexpected and he lost his balance.

“I guess you’ve had plenty of opportunities before now, if that was your plan,” Alex said, pausing as Michael led him to an old, cracked wooden panel that he lifted away from the entrance to a cave. “I guess this used to be part of the old turquoise mines, huh?” There was a tunnel, and Alex’s stomach clenched. He hadn’t really considered the fact that the cave might be deep underground. 

“Yeah, it was.” Michael leaned the panel against the slope and got his own phone out to lead the way in. “This was home for fifty years, for us.”

“How, uh, how far in is it?” Alex hesitated on the outside, and Michael turned to frown at him, then blinked, realisation spreading across his face.

“Not far. And the tunnel’s not too cramped, plenty of space to walk apart from a bit halfway through where you have to duck about an inch or so, and the cave at the end is big. You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, just.” Alex got his own phone out and turned the torch on. “Just go slow. I don’t wanna trip or anything.”

“No problem.” Michael turned away and walked in, and Alex took a deep breath before following him. As long as he focused on the job at hand and Michael walking right ahead of him, and didn’t dwell on the weight of the earth above or the memory of rocks falling around him, he’d be fine.

“Were you aware of it at all?” Alex kept his torch pointed at the ground, his eyes flicking between his feet and Michael’s shoulders ahead of him. 

“Nah. None of us have any memories from before we woke up in here.”

“Do you remember it clearly?”

“Not really.” Michael was quiet for a moment, and they turned a corner. “Watch your head here, it gets a bit low.”

“Thanks.”

“I don’t remember coming out of them,” Michael said suddenly. “Max says he does, Isobel doesn’t. She remembers us holding hands, walking down the road in the dark, and the news story backs that up. We were found by a trucker on the road, and he brought us into Roswell. Who knows what would’ve happened if he’d been heading the other direction.”

“You would’ve ended up in Lincoln or Capitan, maybe.”

“Yeah. First thing I remember for sure is having my photograph taken for the paper.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. They made us sit on separate stools, and Max and Isobel were both crying. We used to…I think we used to be able to talk to each other in our heads. I’m not sure though. Corner coming up, and a downward slope.”

“Okay.”

Alex followed Michael as the tunnel opened suddenly into a large cave, the path sloping down like he’d said, the ceiling rising high above. Their footsteps echoed, and Alex paused to sweep his light around, trying to get a sense of how big the space was.

“Our pods used to be here.” Michael’s voice was tight, and Alex directed his torch towards him. Michael was standing on the sandy rock, surprisingly flat in the middle. “Last time I came out here before Max and Isobel disappeared was a few weeks ago. End of July, or thereabouts.”

“So they could’ve gone missing way before your family did,” Alex frowned. “Did you ever try to move the pods yourself?”

“Yeah, but they were hard to push. They float above the ground by about an inch and a half, but it’s like pushing against a big magnet. They don’t want to be moved, y’know?”

“So it would’ve been difficult, but not impossible,” Alex murmured, turning in a circle and looking around. “Was there anything else in here apart from your pods? Anything personal?”

“No, nothing.”

“I can’t believe no one found them before,” Alex said. “They’re not even that well-hidden.”

“These hills have more tunnels and caves than you could count,” Michael shrugged. “I guess we were just lucky. Till now, anyway.”

“Yeah.” Alex turned in a circle again. “Are there any tunnels leading out of here?”

“No, it’s a dead end. Whoever left us here picked a good spot.”

Alex nodded and looked over at him. “I guess this is it, huh?”

“Guess so.” Michael sighed and walked past him, heading back out to the truck, and Alex hurried to keep up, feeling the darkness closing in behind him like something physical. He was sweating a little when they emerged, and he tipped his head back to look at the sky immediately, sucking in a big lungful of open air. “You really hate caves, huh?” Michael said quietly, lifting the panel back into place over the tunnel entrance.

“Hard not to when you thought you were being trapped in one as it collapsed.” Alex closed his eyes, then opened them again to look at the glorious horizon. The sky was darker now, stars shining up against the velvety blue. It always took him a little by surprise, how fast the temperature dropped once the sun went down, and he shivered as a cool breeze blew in over the hills, heavy clouds being blown in from the west. It made Michael’s curls dance, when Alex looked, and it took him several seconds before he could look away.

“You wanna head back?” Michael asked in a low voice.

“No.” Alex laughed quietly. “Last thing I wanna do is have my head messed with again. It’s only just started feeling clear.”

“What was it like in Isobel and Max’s houses?” Michael asked, coming a step closer. “They were the clearest places you went today, right?”

“And yours, this morning.” Alex glanced out towards the desert and shifted in that direction, starting to walk properly when Michael did. “You keep your place clean, like Isobel and Max do.”

“I try.” Michael walked out alongside him, and slowed down when Alex did. “So this morning, you were feeling yourself then?”

“More myself, yeah.”

“Huh.”

Alex couldn’t even begin to parse the layers of meaning in that, so he elected to ignore it, ducking his head and heading for the passenger side of the truck.

“Hey.” Michael was giving him a look that might have been calculating when Alex looked up. “You wanna go back the long way? Take a ride?”

Alex’s lips twitched. “You’re my only ride, you know that, right?”

Michael smiled back, crooked. “That a yes?”

“Yeah.” Alex walked round the other side of the truck. “Take me for a ride, Guerin.”

Michael swung himself in just after Alex did, and Alex didn’t look at him as the truck rumbled to life, headlights illuminating the earth in front of them. Michael drove slowly, careful of the terrain, and Alex found his eyelids growing heavy, lulled by the darkness and the quiet background growl of the engine. Half-dreams eddied senselessly through his mind, odd things he couldn’t remember once they’d passed. 

Michael sped up once he pulled back onto the highway, and Alex completely failed to suppress a yawn even as he tried to focus on the road. “Tired already?” Michael muttered, sounding amused.

“I’m not used to being the passenger.” Alex covered his mouth as he yawned again, and smiled when Michael caught it and yawned too. “What do your pods look like?” he asked curiously.

Michael glanced at him, one corner of his lower lip sucked into his mouth. Whatever he saw evidently satisfied him, because he looked forward again and shrugged. “They’re all the same size. They look kinda like eggs, narrower at the bottom than the top. They come up to my chest, about here.” He gestured with his hand. “They’re silvery, and they glow. Not a huge amount, but with three of them you don’t really need a torch down there.” He swallowed. “Max’s and Isobel’s are closer together. Were. Mine was a little further away.”

“How did you find them again, after you were all taken to Roswell?” Alex asked, an irrational part of him wishing he could go back in time and push Michael’s pod closer to the others. “Did you just remember where they were?”

“We found them together.” There was a definite note of something like pride in Michael’s voice, and Alex smiled in response. “I figured out roughly where we’d been picked up, divided the area into grids, and we started looking. Took a few months, but between us we got there in the end.”

“Which one of you found the cave? Or were you all sticking together?”

“We were sticking together. Finding our pods again was like…” Michael breathed out slowly. “Like confirmation. We knew what we were, y’know, but finding our pods was real, solid proof. It wasn’t invisible, like our powers. Well, mine and Isobel’s powers, anyway.”

“What d’you mean?”

“When Max heals someone, he leaves a handprint on them,” Michael explained, wrinkling his nose a little. “It’s very obviously alien, so he’s only ever done it for me and Isobel. Though actually, we don’t know if he’d leave one on a human – he’s never tried, just in case.”

“You didn’t mention handprints,” Alex said, heart sinking at the realisation that Michael had kept back something else.

“I forgot,” Michael sighed. “Honestly, I just forgot. I’ve never needed to tell anyone about this stuff before, and I haven’t talked about it with Max and Isobel since we were kids.”

Alex nodded, and pushed down the irrational sting at not being trusted. “When you say Max leaves a handprint, what does that mean?”

“Where he touches someone to heal them, the skin there goes kinda…uh…” Michael’s nose wrinkled again, lips pursing as he tried to describe it. “Well it glows, and it’s kinda glittery-looking, and multi-coloured, but in a sorta…more to the pink and yellow end of the spectrum, kinda like our pods.”

“You said your pods were silvery?”

“They are, but on the inside there’re like…I don’t know, swirls of orange and pink? Pretty pale, but they’re there. From the outside it looks like there’s a gap of maybe a handspan between the outside surface of the pod and where the colours are. We’ve…I’ve…never been able to penetrate them to find out anything about what’s inside. Apart from…” Michael frowned, looking unaccountably nervous. “I managed…a few years back, I extracted some of the substance on the inside of my pod. It looks liquid in a test tube, kinda white, but it evaporates on contact with the atmosphere outside the pod. I’ve got some in the bunker. If you, uh. If you wanted to see.”

Alex recognised that as the olive branch it was, and nodded. “I’d…yeah, if you don’t mind. I don’t know if it’ll help find your family, but…yeah. Is that what’s under that tarp down there?”

“No, that’s something else.” 

Michael volunteered nothing more, and Alex nodded. “Okay.” He saw Michael’s shoulders relax a little, and looked forward again, feeling every inch of space between them. If they were together, if that was possible, he could have slid closer along the bench. He could have pressed their thighs together and wrapped an arm around Michael’s shoulders, resting on the back of the seat. Maybe push his hand into Michael’s hair, maybe kiss his stubbled jaw.

A pattering sound made him blink, and he didn’t realise for a couple of seconds what was happening until his eyes finally focused on the water drops on the windscreen. “Oh.”

“Typical,” Michael sighed, turning on the wipers as the pattering increased, rain falling in fat, heavy droplets through the beams of the headlights. “Just when I thought I’d take you out to Two Rivers.”

Alex smiled, hardly realising he was doing it until he looked at Michael, who caught his eye quickly and grinned. “Seriously?”

“It’s on the way,” Michael shrugged.

It kind of was, technically. The Two Rivers Dam was a couple of miles southwest of Roswell, and Alex mainly remembered it as a date destination for couples who liked outdoorsy stuff, or who had run out of shit to do in Roswell itself. They’d watch the sunset there, and take picnics. And Michael had wanted to go there on their way back to town. Alex tried not to let his smile get too out of control. “If you say so.”

Michael snorted, and they fell back into comfortable silence. The rain fell in steady sheets on the truck as they drove, and Alex leaned against the door and tried to stay awake by going over what he already knew, and what they could do tomorrow.

He jerked awake from a half-dream that ended with the ceiling of the building he’d been in falling down on him, and saw lights on the horizon. He didn’t know how long he’d been dozing exactly, but he was still embarrassed, and grateful that Michael seemed to be pretending he hadn’t noticed.

“You wanna head back to the motel?” Michael asked quietly.

Alex answered without thinking, barriers eroded by tiredness. “Not really.”

“No?” Michael looked over at him, an eyebrow raised, and Alex scrubbed one hand over his face to hide from it.

“How close are we to the boundary?”

“Not far. Coming in from the southwest, we’ll hit the Relief Route in a couple minutes.”

“Okay.” Alex pulled his iron bracelets out from his pockets and slid them over his hands again with a sigh. The prospect of spending another night in that motel room filled him with dread, and he couldn’t stop remembering the depth of the shadows under the desk, and the way the light had flickered. If his sleep had been bad last night, he could only imagine how disturbed it was going to be tonight. It was going to make him slow and sluggish tomorrow, and he was already irritated at the prospect.

He felt the creep of the haunt before they reached the Relief Route. A sick sense of hostility slid down his spine like cold fingers, and he closed his eyes. As they crossed into Roswell, he shuddered, suddenly feeling as though there was someone behind him, watching through the cab’s back window.

“I thought it might be weak again,” Michael said, and Alex could hear the concern in his voice and bristled at it. “Like when we drove in yesterday.”

“It knows me now.” Alex opened his eyes, refusing to twist around to check there really wasn’t anyone crouched in the truck bed, staring at him. The wipers flew back and forth across the windscreen, rain coming down harder. “It’s just as bad as when we left.”

“Can I try something?”

“Sure.”

“Gimme your hand?”

Alex looked at him, hesitating, then stretched out his left hand. Michael reached out without taking his eyes off the road, and their fingers brushed for a second before he figured out where Alex’s were and took his hand lightly. The feeling of being watched slipped away, and Alex curled his fingers around the side of Michael’s palm, thumb stretched over the back of his hand. He could feel the tendons there shift when Michael flexed his fingers and tightened his grip too.

Michael cleared his throat. “Better?”

“Yeah.” Alex’s skin was tingling, heat rising in his cheeks. He’d imagined holding Michael’s hand when he was a kid. He’d wished for it. He’d held his own hand and pretended in his loneliest moments in basic, before he’d locked that part of himself away. “How…” He had to swallow before he could continue, his throat dry. “How do you do that? Do you have to concentrate, or is it…does it just happen?”

“I concentrate. It’s kinda like my telekinesis; it doesn’t just happen on its own.”

“No shaking furniture when you get mad then?” Alex tried to joke.

“Not since I was a kid.” Michael shook his head, their hands lowering slowly until they were resting on the bench, just next to Michael’s hat. “Had to get control of myself pretty quick. I got exorcised once.”

“You got exorcised?” Alex repeated, appalled. “What the hell?”

“It wasn’t a big deal.” Michael’s lips twisted to one side, like he was suppressing a grimace, or a smile. “Wasn’t a shade or anything, just some priest. But y’know, shit starts moving when one of your fosters is acting out, makes sense they’d assume I was possessed.”

“Acting out,” Alex said slowly, resignation settling like nausea in his stomach. That was one of the things his dad had called it, when he decided that a certain behaviour Alex was exhibiting deserved punishment or ridicule, and he saw recognition in Michael’s eyes when he glanced at him.

“Yeah,” he said shortly, looking forward again. “They got rid of me after that anyway. Too much trouble, y’know? Anyway.” He cleared his throat. “We’re nearly there.”

Alex looked out of the window at the darkness, lit with orangey yellow in blurs of colour. He wondered, from time to time, whether the tool shed was haunted now, by what had happened in it. His and Michael’s screams mingling to embed themselves in the walls, in the earth, in the hammer.

He kept hold of Michael’s hand as he pulled up into the motel parking lot, and had to let him slip away to put the truck into park. The haunt didn’t start up again right away, but when he looked at the outside of the motel, it looked like a building from a nightmare. Squat and hunched, the lights shrinking in the darkness that claimed more than its fair share of the space.

As he and Michael watched, the wipers still beating out a swishing rhythm, the lights either side of the lobby door flickered. Alex curled his toes in his shoe, feeling the grit of the salt in there, and told himself it would be enough.

“Offer’s still open,” Michael said suddenly, his tone as casual as if they were contemplating a drive-through menu. 

“Offer?” Alex said, looking at him. Michael met his eyes and shrugged, leaning back against the door and turning his body to face him.

“My trailer’s not big, but it’s not haunted. I’ll sleep in the bunker; it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You…” Alex licked his lips and wished he was still holding Michael’s hand. “I’m not kicking you out of your own bed, Guerin.”

Michael just smiled, the barest lift at the corners of his lips. It made little lines appear either side of his mouth, creases that Alex wanted to press his thumbs to. “Well I’m open to negotiation. Whatever you want.”

How he could offer that boggled Alex’s mind, and freaked him out no end. “Kind of a poor tactic for negotiations, don’t you think?” he asked, running on autopilot.

“Depends what you hope to get out of it,” Michael shrugged. “I told you, what you want’s more important.”

“No, it isn’t.” Alex couldn’t deny the shocked warmth that spread through him at Michael’s statement though, or the way they made him feel sweet and soft. Dangerous things, in other words.

“Is to me.” Michael said, so easy with it that Alex’s first thought was that he had to be lying. No one just _said_ things like that, no one was that honest without having an ulterior motive.

But Michael did have an ulterior motive, didn’t he? He wanted to keep Alex on his side, so that Alex would keep helping him. Alex, understanding this, relaxed. “I’m not kicking you out of your bed.”

Michael’s smile grew a fraction. “You wanna get your stuff then?”

“Come and get it with me.”

Michael turned off the engine and grabbed his hat. He was out of the truck before Alex had even turned to the door, and he shook his head and braced himself for the rain as he stepped out. It was still warm outside, almost muggy, and he hurried over to the building, following Michael before taking the lead and jogging to his room.

He froze just after going in as he saw the shadows twitch under the desk, edging out from under the bed. “Do you see those?”

“What?” Michael came in behind him and glanced around, hands curled into fists.

“The shadows.” Alex kept his voice even. “They’re moving.”

“Only for you.” Michael shook his head and took his hat off, shaking water droplets off it. “They just look like normal shadows to me. There’s haze in here though. Pretty low-grade stuff, but it’s everywhere.” He started the sentence casual and ended it with a frown, looking around.

“More than usual?” Alex asked sharply.

“More than some places.” Michael went over and touched the desk, and like magic, the shadow beneath it returned to normal. “I don’t know, the whole town’s fuzzed up, right? Everything’s all shimmered and kinda staticky, in different degrees. This just seems like…okay, so you know mould grows in certain patterns and it’s thicker in some patches than others? But it’s still all over everything?”

Alex pictured agar plates and bad bread, and nodded. “Sure.”

“This room is a thick patch.”

Alex snorted. “Okay.”

“Like, I could clear it, but…”

“Don’t bother.” Alex grabbed his bag and shoved what few things he had out back into it, and ducked into the bathroom quickly to grab his clean liner, toothbrush, and toothpaste. On his way back out, he grabbed his crutches. “I’m not staying anyway.”

Michael grinned at that, and opened the door for Alex. “After you then.”

The ride back was tense, in the way that Alex kept wanting to reach for Michael across the space between them, and in the way that he had to keep telling himself that he wasn’t going to take advantage of Michael’s apparent willingness to offer himself up like a meal.

It was kind of unfortunate that his resolve on that front was somewhat weakened by the memory of Michael’s body under his, naked and hot, and the memory of how he’d groaned when Alex had kissed his neck with an open mouth. He’d arched his whole back when Alex had dragged his hands down his sides, and thrown his head back against the pillows when Alex sat back to kiss down his chest. Body languid and open, eyes glazed, lips wet.

Alex looked at the road, the white lines vanishing under Michael’s truck in a rhythm as regular as the beat of the windscreen wipers. He looked at the road, and not at Michael, and recited the Fibonacci Sequence in his head to try and keep himself in the present rather than wondering what was going to happen when they got to the junkyard. The rhythm of adding numbers soothed him, the increasing difficulty of it once he hit six digits reassuring.

The roads were clear at this time of night, and they got to Sanders’ faster than they had the day before. By the time they got there though, even with his counting, Alex’s chest was tight from the haunts they’d passed on their way through the centre. He couldn’t stop thinking about the games his father had used to make him play with his brothers, and occasionally with Kyle. How to creep up on someone, how to sneak around without making a noise, how to infiltrate and ‘assassinate’. The goal was to get close enough to kill your opponents without being detected, and once upon a time, Alex had been excellent at it.

It had been a strange period of his life, the time between his mom leaving when he was five, and the summer his dad realised he was gay, when he was thirteen. Seven or so years of relative equilibrium, where he was only bullied at home for being the smallest and weakest, not for being gay. But being small was an asset in infiltrate and assassinate. He could hide in smaller spaces and wait out his older brothers, learning patience, waiting for them to let their guards down.

He’d tried to do it in front of his dad, to try and impress him. He’d suffered his brothers’ anger at being caught out by the runt of the litter. They’d lashed out violently at the time, and if he ever managed to escape what they decided was appropriate retribution, they would exercise patience of their own and get him back later. 

They had different styles of attack. Alex had learned to check his bed for spiders and bugs, Marcus’s preferred tactic. Hunter had liked pranks and mind games, anything that would make Alex feel stupid. Flint had tended to just grab him and give him Chinese burns or a kick to the shins, or he’d sit on him and tickle Alex until he screamed for him to stop.

His dad had never been impressed. Trying to get his approval had been an uphill battle Alex had abandoned after the first time his dad had pinned him against a wall by his throat, forcing him up onto his tiptoes and gazing at him implacably as Alex choked. He’d always been careful not to squeeze or push too hard, not leaving bruises.

Alex could swear his neck felt bruised, his throat swollen and sore. It felt like his brothers were watching him, smiling, waiting. He closed his eyes and moved his hands in his lap so his fingers were touching the iron bracelets of their opposite hands, and it didn’t help at all. His eyes flew open as the truck slowed to a stop, and he breathed out slowly, grabbing his bag and waiting for Michael to get his hat and climb out first before following suit.

He squinted through the rain, part of him convinced that someone was using it as cover, someone was going to come running silently out of the shadows with a knife, or there would be a muffled crack and Michael would fall, a bullet between his eyes.

“Hey.” Michael came round the side of the truck and frowned, grabbing Alex’s wrist. “You okay?”

Alex realised he’d pressed himself back against the hood of the truck, keeping himself a small, covered target. He straightened, embarrassed, and nodded. His skin felt cold where Michael let go, and he hefted his bag over his shoulder rather than think about it, ducking his head against the rain as he followed Michael to his Airstream.

He hadn’t been inside at all yesterday, and he started looking around as soon as the door was closed behind him and Michael turned on a few of the lights. Much like the bunker, it was both bigger and smaller than he expected. There was a folded-out table with a tall office-style bar stool next to it, the table covered in paper up to the point where several large radios were stacked on top of each other against the wall. 

The little area to the right was sort of charming, if messy. A low armchair and a floor lamp stood in front of windows mostly covered by a large whiteboard divided into quarters and covered in equations. To the left was a little kitchen unit, opposite a fridge and cupboards, with a bed peeking out into the walkway down the centre. Right at the end, Alex saw the curve of a sink in what had to be the bathroom. The hammer of rain on the roof was magnified, but not in a bad way. Soothing instead of intimidating.

All over the walls were pieces of paper. Above the whiteboard were three separate spaceship designs, detailed to a level Alex would never have expected, much better than the drawings Michael had pinned up in his bunker. There were weather maps and more schematics and photographs of the New Mexico sky, and a couple of UFO sighting print-outs, like something out of the X-Files. Parts of the walls still had their original wallpaper, an ugly brown floral print, but a few of the overhead lockers didn’t match the others. It was a mismatch, a mess, and Alex smiled to see the evidence of Michael’s life contained in this small space.

None of the surfaces were clear, and there were clothes strewn about pretty much everywhere too. Michael started grabbing them, and Alex leaned against the kitchen counter and watched with a small smile as he gathered everything up and shuffled past to shove it all in his closet. “Not expecting guests?”

“Not really.” Michael gestured to the front of the Airstream, to the radios and the whiteboard, and all the pictures. “I try to keep all this outta sight if I bring anyone back. Try not to do that at all though. Not that anyone’s usually keen to come back to a trailer parked in a junkyard.” His tone was dry, all sharpness directed at himself. “You hungry?”

“I ate already,” Alex said apologetically.

“More for me.” Michael shrugged and gestured to the armchair. “Make yourself at home. Just, uh, let me know if you want me to…” He lifted his hands and wiggled his fingers, almost like he was doing jazz hands, and Alex smiled, stepping into the trailer properly and turning to sit on the armchair.

“If I notice anything, sure.” He looked around, half-watching Michael as he cleared the detritus on the kitchen counter. He found his attention caught by two photographs of a deep pink sunset over the desert, tacked up to the right of the table. They were beautiful, and probably old, taken before digital cameras took off. Alex liked the inexpert angles of them, the just-better-than-mediocre frame and lighting. He’d seen sunsets like that in real life, and he could imagine how spectacular that one must have been, the pink shading almost to purple, the deep, deep reds where the clouds were closer to the horizon. Like the sky was blazing with unearthly fire, jewelled and smoky and too big to be taken in by one look alone. 

And Michael had tried to capture that beauty on camera. He’d seen a sunset and liked it so much that he’d taken photographs of it. He’d seen the New Mexico sky and seen something of worth, something to remember.

Alex turned to watch Michael properly, a tiny smile nudging at his lips. Michael was rinsing beans off in a battered colander in the sink, using as little water as possible by the look of it. Alex settled back and soaked in the quiet as Michael cooked. His use of the space was balletic, every move perfectly judged. Alex would have been frustrated with such a tiny part of the surface to actually work on, but Michael’s expression was calm. 

He put the beans on to boil in a small metal pot and chopped an onion on a scarred plastic board. That went into a larger pot with oil and a bunch of spices Alex couldn’t see the names of, and a few minutes later, a tin of chopped tomatoes and a stock cube. Everything had its place, everything was neatly stored. Michael’s trailer might look like a mess, but it was clear that the insides of his cupboards were organised. 

While the pots simmered, Michael got them each a beer from his fridge and tidied a bit more, gathering the papers on his table into piles, and burying his head in his closet for a minute, presumably sorting out everything he’d shoved in there to give Alex space to sit down. When he came out, he stripped his bed, and Alex’s eyes widened only slightly when the duvet cover flew off on its own.

“Practical applications of telekinesis,” Michael smirked, when he saw him looking. “Makes this way easier.”

Alex nodded. “I can see.”

With his powers, Michael didn’t have to struggle with shoving the pillows and duvets back into fresh covers – his telekinesis smoothed the fabric on so quickly and easily that Alex was jealous despite himself, even though he hadn’t changed his own sheets since leaving the Air Force, a benefit of living out of motels. Michael went back to cooking once he was done, cracking open the window behind the counter to let some of the heat out.

The beans were drained again, and added to the bigger pot along with some chocolate Michael got out of the fridge. Alex kept wanting to look around at all the other things tacked up on the walls, or try to figure out what Michael was working on on the big whiteboard, but he couldn’t pull his gaze away from Michael for more than a couple of seconds at a time.

“Where’d you learn to cook?” he heard himself ask, softer than he’d really meant to, barely audible over the sound of the rain.

Michael shrugged a shoulder, stirring the chilli. “Books. The internet. Can’t do much, I don’t really have space for anything fancy, but it’s cheaper than getting takeout every day.”

“It smells really good.”

Michael’s smile was a small, pleased thing, and he turned his head a little as if he was trying to hide it. “Glad you think so, because it’s gonna smell like this all night.”

“Fine by me.”

Michael snorted, and reached up to get a stacked tower of plastic takeout boxes from the locker above him. He tasted the chilli, deemed it acceptable, and started spooning it into boxes, filling four and leaving them out to cool before grabbing a spoon and starting to eat the rest straight from the pot. Economical to the point of perfection, and Alex tried to ignore the swelling feeling of fondness in his chest.

“You don’t have any questions?” Michael asked after a minute, jerking his chin to indicate their surrounds. “About all this?”

Alex looked around, and leaned back to look behind him at the whiteboard again. Tacked almost directly above his head was a piece of paper with a ship design drawn on it in pencil, and Alex looked between them for a second before looking back at Michael, making a decision on the spot. “I don’t remember you being this good at drawing in school.”

“Seriously?” Michael laughed. “It’s a drawing of the spaceship I think I crash landed on this planet in, and you’re more interested in my artistic talents?”

Alex shrugged. “You’ve answered a million of my questions about that stuff already, when you showed me the bunker. I’m more interested in you.” He’d held back yesterday, but after their kiss this morning and Michael wanting to take him to Two Rivers, he was feeling bolder.

“I am an alien.” Michael’s smile faded slightly, a little more jaded. “No separating me from that.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think you coming from space gives you a better eye for schematics.” 

“It might.”

“Not if Max’s artistic talents are any indication,” Alex said dryly. “I saw his doodles in class. Da Vinci, he was not.”

Michael snorted, then ducked his head to look at the nearly-empty pot of chilli. “Yeah. I don’t know, I just practiced, I guess. I’ve been trying to figure out how we got here since I can remember.”

“And have you? Figured it out?”

Michael shook his head, chewing around a last mouthful. “Too much missing data,” he said quietly, when he’d swallowed. “Way too much I don’t know, and probably never will. I’ve done what I can, but without going back in time or getting into government and military databases, I’m kinda limited.”

“Have you tried?” Alex asked, suddenly alarmed.

“Nah. I’m not a hacker, that’s never been my thing. I can do some really basic stuff, but physics is more my focus. It is yours though, right?” He tilted his head. “You said yesterday you were a codebreaker, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Alex had definitely mentioned it at some point, but didn’t want Michael to ask him to do something illegal. And maybe Michael could tell, because he nodded.

“How’d you get into that? You weren’t a computer geek in school.”

Alex hid his relief and raised an eyebrow. “How do you know?”

“Because that was Weirdo Will and his crew, and you never hung out with them.”

“I might’ve been a secret geek.”

“Between spending all your time in the music practice rooms and working at the UFO Emporium?”

“Were you stalking me, Guerin?” Alex asked, amused, and suppressed a smile when Michael scowled.

“No! I just noticed, that’s all. Started paying attention after you told me I could crash in your shed.”

Alex pushed down the familiar sinking feeling that came over him whenever he thought of that. He wanted to keep Michael talking, keep things light. “That why it took you so long to do it? You were checking I was serious?”

“Kinda, yeah.” Michael got up and put the pot back on the stove, and moved all the takeout boxes full of chilli to the table. “Can’t blame me for being suspicious, right? No one ever wants something for nothing.”

“You don’t think altruism exists?” Alex asked.

“No.” Michael scraped out the last of the chilli from the pot and sucked the spoon clean. “Everyone gets something out of a good deed, or they wouldn’t do it. Even if it’s just a warm, fuzzy feeling, it’s not nothing.”

“And in cases where it disadvantages the person doing the good deed?” Alex asked mildly.

“They’re doing it because they believe they have to.” Michael shrugged and turned the faucet on, rinsing out the pots with his hands, moving fast through the oil. “Lots of people do good deeds out of duty.”

“Then I guess the real question is, does it matter?”

“Yeah, it does.” Michael turned the faucet off and kept swishing the water around, brow furrowed. “Being helped because someone wants to help you is completely different from it being someone’s job.”

“Yeah.” Alex considered that, leaning back in the armchair. “I guess it is.”

“Of course it is. That’s why I didn’t take you up on it straight away.” Michael drained the sink and got out a sponge and some dish soap. “Couldn’t figure out what would be in it for you.”

“Doesn’t make the help invalid or whatever if it’s coming from someone who has to give it though,” Alex said, pivoting away from the personal. “Like, just because it’s a doctor giving you pain meds, doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing for you.”

Michael gave him a quick, unimpressed look, hands still scrubbing. “You know what I mean though. No one likes accepting charity.”

“That’s different. Charity’s…I don’t know, embarrassing.”

Michael snorted. “Right, exactly.”

“Like it’s a gift that you should be grateful for, and continue being grateful for, and it’s something that can be withdrawn at any time.”

“And it isn’t something you deserve, that’s the thing, right?” Michael’s lip curled. “It’s a _gift_.”

“That isn’t what I was doing, with the tool shed,” Alex said before his brain could catch up with his mouth. “You know that, right?”

“I figured it out.” Michael smiled down at the sink, crooked and easy. “Still didn’t really get why though. Like, would you have done that for anyone, or was I just special?”

Alex wanted to say that he would have offered the shed to anyone, but that would have been a lie. He rubbed his hands together and tried not to frown. “I wouldn’t’ve done it for anyone.”

“So I was special.” Michael’s grin was a flash of teeth, there and gone again in an instant.

“Yeah.” Alex decided on the spur of the moment not to lie or misdirect. “You were.” It was actually very satisfying to see Michael’s smirk slip for a second, mouth going a little slack, eyes a little wide before he turned his face away to hide it. It wasn’t dangerous to admit that, in any case. The past tense was a safe refuge; it didn’t give away anything he was feeling now. They could be two old flames hooking up for convenience

“Careful.” Michael pulled his crooked smile back on, giving Alex a wry look. “You’ll give me a big head.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Right, you’re clearly so short on confidence.”

“Hey, I might have hidden depths.”

“Oh those you have.” Alex raised an eyebrow. “But that’s not the same thing.”

Michael snorted and rinsed everything in the sink off one last time, and propped them up to dry. He wiped his hands on his jeans and reached for his beer, stepping back to sit on the tall chair without looking, totally familiar with his surroundings. He rolled the bottle between his palms, frowning at it, and Alex took a sip from his own. “You feeling okay?” he asked Alex after a moment. “Not haunted?”

Alex shook his head, considering it. “Not haunted. I don’t think so, anyway.” Suddenly curious, he put his beer on the table and pulled his iron bracelets off, ignoring Michael’s wide eyes.

“What’re you doing?”

“Experimenting. I don’t want to wear these all night anyway, if I don’t have to.” Alex put the bracelets on the table next to his beer, two heavy black rings clinking as he put them down. He pulled up the cuff of his left trouser leg first, and ignored Michael’s eyes on him as he unclasped the anklet and pulled it open. The bracelets were simple rings he could squeeze over his hands, but the anklets were hinged so they could be taken on and off easier. 

He laid the first anklet on the table next to the bracelets, and leaned down again to remove the one around his prosthesis. He always rolled the top of his sock over it when he wore it, his prosthetic ankle being so much thinner than a real one. He laid that anklet on top of the other and sat back in the chair again, looking at the floor between him and Michael so he wouldn’t have to look at the man himself. 

“Feel anything?” Michael asked, and Alex rolled his eyes.

“It’s not instant, Guerin.”

“Well I wouldn’t know, would I?” Michael asked sarcastically.

“Just let me acclimatise for a second, would you?”

Michael mimed zipping his lips and lifted his beer to his mouth, eyes never leaving Alex.

Alex sighed and closed his eyes for a moment to escape, trying not to concentrate on himself. He considered the next day instead, thinking of the last time he’d seen Mimi, back before he’d even graduated. He’d finished out the school year in a sort of numb haze, and he couldn’t really remember his graduation at all. Mimi must have been there, but he couldn’t find any memories of it. He’d been practically under house arrest – his dad had made him quit his job at the UFO Emporium and kept him locked up until it was time to send him off to the Air Force.

His memories of those weeks were fractured and messy. Everything that had happened in the tool shed was burned into his mind in high-definition technicolour, but everything afterwards was a blur, even the last time he’d seen Michael. He remembered his dad holding his head still with a hand in his hair and reaching up with his other hand to pinch Alex’s septum ring distastefully between thumb and forefinger, tugging ever so gently. Alex hadn’t even breathed, he didn’t think. 

He remembered cleaning the tool shed from top to bottom, removing every trace of himself from its walls. He remembered being too afraid to sneak out to go to Rosa’s funeral. He remembered getting rid of his makeup, his jewellery, a lot of his clothes. His dad had made it very clear that when Alex went to basic, he was leaving home for good. He wasn’t to leave his belongings behind to clutter up the house.

He remembered sitting alone in his bedroom on his eighteenth birthday, crying and crying, unable to stop. That version of him never would have believed that exactly twelve years later, Michael Guerin would come and find him and bring him back to Roswell.

So much for thinking about Mimi. Alex closed his eyes again, frowning.

“You okay?” Michael asked cautiously.

“Yeah. I think so.” Alex took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “I’ll tell you if I start feeling haunted, okay?”

“Sure.” Michael lifted his beer to his lips again, and Alex picked up his own bottle to do the same. “What d’you wanna do now? More questions?”

Alex lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug. “What happened with you and Max? You guys used to be inseparable.” He regretted his unnecessarily barbed approach when Michael’s face clouded.

“I don’t wanna talk about Max and Isobel. I can’t…look, I can’t think about them right now. You know?” He shook his head and finished off his beer, looking away from Alex, who felt like Michael had just tipped him out of his chair and onto the floor.

“Sure,” he said. “I get it.”

“If I think about them, I’ll freak out.” Michael rolled the empty bottle between his palms, head hanging low. “I can’t right now. The night I got back, and the whole day after, I ran around like a headless chicken. I was panicking, and I wasted time.” His voice was tight with self-recrimination. “I thought finding you, I thought getting a human view of things would…I don’t know, I thought…”

“You thought we’d’ve found them by now,” Alex said quietly, and didn’t look away when Michael met his eyes and nodded, lips pressed tightly together. “We’ll find them, Guerin,” he said, as firm as he could. “We’ll figure this out. We’ll find them.”

“What if we don’t?” Michael practically whispered it, and Alex leaned forward at the fear in his voice, wanting to do something but not knowing what. “What happens when your week’s up? You’ll leave, and I’ll be stuck here and I won’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, you keep looking at me like I’m meant to have any idea how to lead on this, and I _don’t_.”

Alex wished he was closer, wished he could reach out and take Michael’s hands. All he could do was try to sound certain. “Guerin, we will find them. It’s only been a day.”

“The longer they’re missing, the colder the trail gets, right?” Michael laughed, a horrible, frightened sound. “Isn’t that how it goes? The longer someone’s missing, the less likely they’ll be found? What the hell am I gonna do if I can’t find them? They’re all I have. They’re…they’re the only other people like me on this whole planet, I can’t do this without them.”

“You won’t have to,” Alex promised. “Look, if we don’t find them this week, I’ll take a leave of absence. I’m not going to leave you here on your own. I…” He wanted to quaver when Michael met his eyes, and that just steeled his resolve. “I won’t do that again.”

Michael frowned, an odd, hurt look in his eyes. He shifted in his chair, tilting his chin up. “That why you came?”

“No.” Alex looked between Michael’s face and his hands, beer bottle still pressed between his palms. “This isn’t charity, or guilt, or obligation.”

“Then what is it? Why are you here? Why are you helping me?”

Had he sounded like that when Alex had told him about the tool shed? When he’d given him Flint’s guitar? Confused and suspicious, because life had taught him that nothing came without a price. Alex shook his head, trying to find the right words. “I wanted to,” he said, hating how inadequate it sounded. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” He didn’t want to tell Michael he would do anything he asked. He didn’t want to bare so much of himself, put his weakest parts on display like that. He cleared his throat and said, “So, uh. It’s been a really long day, I’ve been up since like, four. Would you mind if I crashed? I know it’s still kinda early, but…”

“No, sure.” Michael put his bottle on the table and gestured to the bed behind him. “Knock yourself out. Figuratively speaking.”

“Thanks.” It wasn’t embarrassingly early, anyway. It was coming up on eleven, Alex saw when he checked his watch, and he grabbed his bag and slid past Michael into the back half of the trailer. Michael kept his back to him while he brushed his teeth, changed into pyjama shorts and an old, thin t-shirt, and removed his leg. He plugged his phone in to charge as well, at the outlet above his head, next to the kitchen unit.

“You mind if I keep the light on for a bit?” Michael asked quietly, still not looking back at him.

“No, go ahead. I can sleep pretty much anywhere these days.” A lie. He’d been spoiled by having rooms to himself for the last few years, but it was usually noise that bothered him, not light, and exhaustion rolled over him like fog as he lay down, so he didn’t think it would take long to drift off.

Michael’s bed was comfier than it looked, and the sheets smelled fresh and clean. The pillows were down at the end by the kitchen unit, the shadow of it shielding Alex from the light. It was going to be a tighter squeeze with two of them, but Alex lay flat on his back and judged that as long as one of them lay on their side, they would fit.

Which reminded him – “Don’t sleep in the bunker,” he muttered. “I meant it when I said I wasn’t kicking you out of your bed.”

“You don’t mind sharing?” Michael asked, and Alex could hear his raised eyebrows in his voice. His own eyes were already closed, too heavy to keep open. The quiet drum of rain on the trailer roof was the perfect background noise for him to drop off to.

“Never minded before.” He rolled onto his left side, facing the wall, and mashed his face into the pillow. “Night, Guerin.”

If Michael replied, he didn’t hear it.

He snapped awake and froze, eyes wide open. There was a hand on his shoulder, someone standing behind him, and he was just about to explode into motion when Michael said, “Sorry, you mind if I climb over you?”

It was just Michael.

Alex breathed out and rolled onto his back, eyes adjusting to the darkness. Michael was a curly-haired shadow leaning over him, and he nodded. “Sure, no problem.”

“Thanks.” Michael let go of his shoulder and didn’t touch him as he climbed over him to settle against the wall, sliding under the covers. “Feel free to steal the sheets,” he mumbled. “I usually kick ‘em off by morning anyway.”

“Alright.” Alex rolled over to face the inside of the trailer, careful not to drag the sheets with him. With both of them on their sides, there was just a sliver of space between them, and Alex imagined trying to fall asleep while maintaining that distance. He was too tired for bullshit, so he shifted until his good leg was pressed gently against Michael’s, and closed his eyes when he felt Michael relax behind him.

Michael was radiating warmth, and Alex’s eyelids were heavy. He fell asleep again quickly.

The dream faded almost immediately as Alex jerked awake and lay in silence on his back, tense and still. The rain had stopped. Michael was still on his side, back pressed to the wall, not quite snoring into his pillow. Alex’s non-existent right foot was cramping horribly, and he gritted his teeth and tried to remember the dream. 

He’d been in Roswell, he was pretty sure. In high school? Maybe. Hiding? From Kyle and his friends? He couldn’t remember.

The pain spread up into the calf that was no longer there, and Alex swallowed, squeezing his eyes shut and breathing through it. He hadn’t had phantom pains this bad for a good few months, and as always he was taken aback by how much it hurt. He held onto his elbow with his left hand and clutched the collar of his t-shirt with his right, adjusting his grip with his breathing.

In for four, hold for four, out for four.

What was left of his right leg trembled briefly, muscles trying to unclench and stretch. Alex mouthed curses to himself in the dark, furious at his body’s timing. Of course this couldn’t have happened last night, when he’d been on his own and he could have gotten up or at least sworn out loud.

The pain twisted, and Alex sucked in a sharp breath through his nose, biting down savagely on his lower lip. Despite himself, a tiny grunt of pain escaped, and he flexed his left foot to try and distract himself. He froze when Michael shifted next to him, and tried to stay as still as he could, breathing deeply like he was asleep.

For a moment, he thought he’d pulled it off, but then Michael shifted again, and said, “Alex?”

No point in pretending. Alex opened his eyes and looked up at the lockers curving above them. “Yeah?”

“You okay?” Michael’s voice was rough with sleep, and Alex hated himself for waking him.

“Yeah, don’t worry.”

“What’s wrong?”

Alex couldn’t think of a good excuse, and realised after a second of trying to think of one that he didn’t even want to. “Phantom limb pain,” he muttered. “It’s nothing, it’ll stop in a bit.” Hopefully.

Michael moved slightly, and one of his arms touched Alex’s shoulder. “Anything I can do?”

“Not really.”

“Painkillers don’t work?”

“Not really.” They did sometimes, but Alex didn’t particularly like taking them, especially when there was a part of him that protested that it made no sense to try to treat pain in a part of his body that no longer existed. It was illogical.

The pressure against his shoulder increased a little, and Alex’s stomach fluttered in a pleasant way when he felt Michael’s sigh as a puff of warm air on his neck. “Alright. Tell me if you think of something.”

“Okay.”

The pain didn’t go away. Alex breathed through it as best he could, and wished Michael would fall back to sleep, but he could tell he wasn’t. So finally he sighed. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Feels like about two am.” Michael sat up and reached behind them for something – his phone, Alex saw when he tipped his head back. “Yeah, it’s just gone two.”

“You always know what time it is?”

“I’ve got a pretty good sense for it.” Michael lay down again, closer this time, his legs pressed to Alex’s, his curled hands tucked against Alex’s shoulder. Alex tensed through an urge to shiver, and winced as his phantom leg twisted again, phantom bones grinding, phantom muscles screaming. “Didn’t realise for a long time other people didn’t.”

“It’s useful.”

“Comes in handy,” Michael agreed. “Max…Max and Isobel don’t have it either, so it’s not an alien thing, I don’t think.”

He didn’t think. Alex exhaled slowly. “Just a you thing.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s amazing,” Alex said without thinking, too tired to filter. “How similar you are to humans.” He felt Michael go very still next to him, and hurried to explain. “I mean, if I ever thought about the possibility of alien life, I thought it’d be something completely different, like a completely different form of organism or something. Plants, or just bacteria, or whatever. But you’re completely indistinguishable from us. What’re the odds?”

Michael didn’t move. “Pretty slim.”

“Slim to zero.” Alex stared up at the ceiling. “It’s kind of a miracle.” He gritted his teeth through another throb of pain. “Like, it’s all about the context, the way you look at it.”

“What d’you mean?” Michael asked warily.

“How people think about aliens. Like, as a threat, or as a joke, or something science-related, or pop-culture related.”

Michael was quiet for a moment. “Safer for us to assume we’d be treated as a threat.”

“Yeah.” Alex hated it, but it was true. He hadn’t really been thinking too much about the whole alien part of what Michael had told him, not in too much detail, because it really was insane. But now he wanted to think about literally anything, anything else but his leg, and he wanted to try and explain what he meant to try and make Michael relax again. “You were so unlucky, in a way.”

Michael snorted. “You’ll have to be more specific about which part you’re talking about there.”

“Just…the timing of it all. You had the bad luck to crash land in the United States during one of the most paranoid periods of history it’s ever gone through. What would happen if something like that happened now? There’s no way you’d be able to contain it in the same way, not when everyone has a camera on their phone.”

“They’d still take us away,” Michael said quietly. “They’d lock us up.”

“Yeah.” Alex sighed. “Probably. But what if you crashed somewhere else? Would the government in a different country do that? There was definitely at least one adult survivor of your crash, so would they have been treated as a liaison or a refugee rather than a threat?”

“No point speculating,” Michael muttered. “It is how it is. Everyone else is dead, and we’re alone on this rock. Just the three of us.” He didn’t mention his fear of never finding Max and Isobel again, and Alex wasn’t about to bring it up.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said instead. He didn’t want to say he was glad Michael’s ship had crashed, or glad that his life had gone the way it had just so they would have the chance to meet, but telling Michael he was glad they could exist at the same time, in the same space, that seemed acceptable enough. “You’re amazing, you know.”

It was the best feeling in the world, sensing Michael relax next to him. Alex breathed through another cramp and almost smiled. “You’re just saying that because I’m keeping the ghosts away,” Michael said dryly, and Alex snorted.

“I’m really not. It’s…it’s context, like I said.”

“How d’you mean?”

“I keep thinking…” Alex laughed, wincing through it a little. “I’m so mad at this stupid planet. The way we reacted to actual alien life, obviously sentient, obviously advanced, we could’ve…Jesus, we should’ve done so much better. We should’ve helped, and…and I don’t know, if there were survivors, tried to help them and keep them together, and instead we covered it all up and made the survivors feel so unsafe that…you’ve been in hiding your whole lives, that’s so screwed up. And it’s so stupid. We could’ve started, like, Starfleet by now or something, if we’d collaborated with your people.”

Michael let out a quiet breath. “My people.”

“That’s what they are, right?” Alex turned his head to look at him, and blinked when he realised just how close Michael was, just a few inches of space between their faces on the pillows. His eyes shone, reflecting what dim light there was, and Alex realised only when his phantom foot spasmed again that he was holding his breath.

Michael ducked his head, curls obscuring most of his face. “Yeah,” he rasped. “I guess no one’s ever called them that before. Max and Isobel don’t like talking about it. They wanna blend in.”

“You can talk about it to me, if you want,” Alex offered, before he could think about it too much. It wasn’t like he didn’t want to hear it, after all. He wanted to know these things about Michael. He wanted Michael’s secrets and thoughts, and he wanted Michael to share them. To want to share them. “Only if you want,” he added. “You don’t have to.”

Michael was quiet for so long that Alex turned his face back to the ceiling and had to concentrate on his breathing again, and contend with a brand-new ache in his chest along with it. It was fine, he told himself. He’d already known that Michael didn’t want to tell him anything more than absolutely necessary. It made sense.

“Did I tell you we can drink nail polish remover?” Michael said suddenly, and Alex’s whole body seemed to lift. 

He turned to look at Michael again and hoped his smile wasn’t visible in the dark. “No.”

“We can. Normal painkillers don’t have any real effect on us, but acetone does.”

“It’s a painkiller for you?”

“Yeah, and a sort of boost. Not a big one, just a little lift. Helps if you’re tired, kinda like coffee.”

They whispered to each other in the dark as the pain in Alex’s leg slowly eased. He learned that Michael had discovered that he could drink nail polish remover while he was at a foster home in Albuquerque. Michael told him about buying his truck, saving up and stealing to get the money. He told him about shoplifting when he was a kid, and using his telekinesis to cheat at pool, and using it to break Foster’s wife’s pickup so he’d be able to fix it for her and get in her good books.

“You trying to tell me you’re not a nice person, Guerin?” Alex mumbled, eyes closed now.

“I’m not,” Michael murmured.

“Well I knew that already.” Alex huffed and stretched, using it as an excuse to press his body against Michael’s, soaking in his warmth. “S’not like I’m a saint.”

“Hmm. Your leg feel better?”

“Yeah. Told you it’d stop eventually.” Alex hesitated, then asked, “Does your hand hurt still?”

Silence. Then, “Yeah.”

Alex didn’t want to know, so he made himself ask, “How bad?”

“Gets stiff and seizes up sometimes, when it’s cold or I overwork it.” Michael exhaled a long breath against Alex’s shoulder. “Twinges less than it used to. My wrist…that hurts too, sometimes. I’m used to it now.”

Alex blinked rapidly in the darkness, throat tight. Why had he asked? Why did he always have to ask? “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He didn’t know if he’d be able to say it in daylight, looking Michael in the eye. It was hard enough doing it while Michael was curled up against his side in a bed they were sharing.

“Don’t be stupid,” Michael muttered. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t hit me.”

“I really don’t understand why you don’t hate me,” Alex whispered.

Michael sighed, and Alex closed his eyes when he felt Michael press his mouth to his shoulder, over his shirt. “You’re the first person who gave me something without expecting anything in return. Go to sleep, Alex. It’s like, half two in the morning.”

Alex felt like it should have taken longer, but he was so tired that just a minute or so of the quiet, with only Michael’s steady breathing filling it, sent him back to sleep.

Alex jerked awake and sat up, gasping and terrified. The darkness was pressing it at him like something physical, he was in the trailer but it wasn’t the trailer, everything was wrong, everything was wrong – 

“Alex?”

Alex squeezed his eyes shut, then had to open them again because it was worse not seeing. He was too scared to look at Michael, absolutely convinced that if he did, it wouldn’t really be him. It would be somebody different, speaking with Michael’s voice, but with a different face, or no face at all. He was freezing cold, rigid with fear, and he wanted to say he was being haunted, but all that came out was a breathless, “Help.”

Michael sat up and grabbed his arm, and the irrational fear drained away. Alex shuddered and let his eyes fall closed. “Fuck.”

“You okay?” Michael sounded freaked out, and Alex couldn’t blame him. “Your voice was completely screwed up just then.”

“Nightmare. Shit, where’s my phone?”

“Here, hang on.” Michael twisted around, and a moment later handed Alex his phone. It was fully charged, and he winced at the brightness when he opened it, going to the notes app as quickly as he could, absently noting the time as 3:47. “What’re you doing?” Michael asked.

“Trying to remember everything. Give me a second.” He turned down the brightness and started to type, muttering as he did. “It was a haunted dream; I know it was. Had one yesterday too, but this one was different, I think. I was…here in Roswell.” He slowed down, matching his words to the speed of his thumbs so he wouldn’t get ahead of himself. “Similar-strange, everything was too close together and too far apart at the same time, and it was dark, daylight dark – I could still see clearly. I think you were there,” he added, trying to hold onto the memories as they flew apart. “You, but not you. And I was me, but not me. You know?”

“Not really,” Michael said, still sounding a little worried.

“I didn’t see you, but I’m sure it was you. But, y’know, not you.” Alex’s fingers flew across the screen. “I think I was hunting you. Or you were hunting me? Or we were sort of taking it in turns, I don’t know. Some of the buildings were made of glass, and there were these symbols everywhere, I’m sure I recognised some of them…” He sighed and trailed off, closing his eyes and trying to remember anything else. “Shit. I hate it when that happens.” He turned to put his phone back on the kitchen unit behind them. “Shit.”

“You write your dreams down?” Michael watched him, and Alex hated the concern in his voice.

“When they’re haunt-related, yeah. Throws up connections sometimes – your barriers are lower when you’re asleep, it makes it easier for a haunt to influence you or get in your head.” He missed being able to pull both knees up to his chest. Technically he still could, but it was much harder to do it with his right knee, given that he had no foot to support it. If he did it now, it just made him feel unbalanced and irritable. He sighed and stretched his legs out instead, leaning forward to push his hands through his hair. “Sorry, I sleep badly even without nightmares, I should’ve warned you.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.” Michael lay down again and yawned, passing it immediately onto Alex, who hid his in the crook of his arm. “I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere, I’m hard to disturb.”

“Lucky.” Alex sighed and swung himself sideways. “Go back to sleep. Hopefully I won’t wake up again.”

“No big deal if you do,” Michael mumbled. Alex had already judged the distance between the bed and the toilet earlier, and pushed himself up onto his foot, balancing with one hand on the divider at the end of the bed and one hand on the bit of wall that stuck out next to the toilet. From there it was delightfully easy to spin around, reach out to balance himself on the sink, and twist forward a little to be right in front of the toilet.

It was always so much harder in motel rooms. Always such a hassle, having to use his crutches just to take a leak in the middle of the night.

Alex didn’t realise he was almost shivering until he slid back into the bed next to Michael, who made a face when he felt Alex’s foot against his, and then hissed when he felt Alex’s arm. “You’re freezing, what the hell? You were only up for like, two seconds.”

“Side-effect of the haunt.” Alex lay on his back, trying to be as still as possible, to take up only as much space as he had to. “It’s okay.”

Michael huffed and shifted to push the covers over Alex better, pulling them up over his shoulders, right up his neck. His hand, two good fingers and two crooked, brushed against Alex’s cheek and lingered, just for a moment. His skin was so warm it was obscene, and before he could think about it Alex reached up and held onto his wrist, holding him there.

Michael relaxed, fingers curved lightly around the line of Alex’s jaw, thumb a hot line almost at the corner of his mouth. Alex turned his face towards him, holding onto his wrist and sighing, pressing Michael’s hand firmer against his skin. He was so warm, and Alex’s eyes fell closed as Michael’s thumb rubbed against his cheek, hand shifting against his jaw, palm hot, fingers burning where they covered his ice-cold ear. 

It was like Michael was the only source of heat and life in the world, and Alex was completely helpless against the urge to turn towards him like a flower to the sun. When Michael’s thumb pressed briefly against the corner of his lips, Alex’s mouth fell open a little, and he was too tired and hungry for more to be embarrassed.

Michael’s hand moved slowly, thumb sweeping across Alex’s cheek from his mouth to his eyelashes, fingers sliding just a little bit past Alex’s hairline, tracing the shell of his ear, every caress so gentle it almost hurt. Alex’s hand on Michael’s wrist flexed, and he opened his eyes as Michael’s hand stilled.

He couldn’t see Michael’s expression clearly in the dark, but he caught the movement of his tongue wetting his lips, and saw the impression of his eyelashes as they flicked down, then up. His thumb pressed a little harder into Alex’s cheek, and Alex shifted forward to kiss him. They came together on a shared breath, and Alex pushed Michael onto his back, crawling half on top of him. The heat of him was so good, and the way he twisted his right arm underneath Alex to wrap around his back and pull him closer was even better.

It made Alex dizzy to know Michael wanted him. To feel the evidence of it as Michael dragged his hand down from Alex’s head to his ass, a line of delicious warmth down his back, thawing him out. He was drunk on Michael’s kisses, gasping into his mouth, helpless, wanting sounds slipping out before he could stop them.

But Michael drank them up, and crooked a leg up and over Alex’s to get more of their bodies pressed together. He cradled Alex’s face with his hand, then slid both his hands down to push them up and under the back of Alex’ t-shirt. Alex arched into him with a quiet moan, and his stomach flipped when Michael bit down on his bottom lip, pulling it for a second before letting go. He made Alex chase him, pressing their foreheads together to keep a frustrating fraction of space between their mouths, twisting to brush their lips together without letting Alex seal them.

Alex rolled his hips and dragged his arm up, pushing his still-cold hand into Michael’s hair to curve around the back of his skull and pull him into a kiss that had Michael groaning, kissing back so enthusiastically that it might have been Alex who’d been the one teasing him.

He’d done something like that back in Las Cruces, the third time. When Alex had thought they might be done, but Michael had just lain next to him and kept touching him, sweeping his hand across Alex’s bare chest like he couldn’t get enough, sliding it down to his thighs, between them, up again. A teasing dance that had coaxed Alex back to hardness far faster than it should have done, had him arching up against the bed to try and get more contact. But every time he did, Michael had gentled his touch. He’d grinned like he’d won the fucking lottery when Alex had finally growled and rolled on top of him, pressing as much of his skin to Michael’s as physically possible.

Michael wanted to feel wanted as well, and he wanted Alex to show it.

Alex kissed him deeply until Michael was breathless, and then rolled off him to tug at the hem of his shirt, pushing and dragging until Michael lifted his arms up and let Alex pull it off. He reached for Alex’s, but Alex pushed him down and ducked his head to kiss his chest, kneeling over him and bracing himself with one hand on the bed, the other sliding up Michael’s shoulder, his neck, to rub his fingertips over that wet, wanting mouth.

Michael opened it and took Alex’s index and middle fingers into his mouth with a pleased sigh, rolling his hips up against nothing. Alex shifted further down, flicking his tongue over one of Michael’s nipples, opening his mouth against his belly, then shifting off of him and sitting up to drag Michael’s shorts off. Michael lifted his legs up to help, and the second his shorts were gone Alex pushed him down again and resumed kissing his way down his body.

Michael let him. Michael groaned when Alex stroked him, and twisted his head against the pillow when Alex licked him, teasing, wanting to hear how Michael wanted him back. He waited until Michael snapped and gasped, “Please, fuck, _please,_” before leaning down to suck him properly. 

He’d wished before, sometimes, that sex didn’t have to be reciprocal. He’d done it that way in the past, a couple of times, but it had been weird. He’d never known how to explain that sometimes, it was easier to focus completely on somebody else, without the pressure of having to be vulnerable in front of them too. He wanted to be able to make someone fall apart without having to suffer through the same for them. Especially when it was clear that it was only an obligation, and they didn’t really care about him anyway.

There wasn’t that edge of uncertainty with Michael. Michael’s hand fluttered delicately through his hair, then pulled at his shoulder. He kissed Alex fiercely when he followed him up, and Alex let him pull his shirt off. He let Michael shove his shorts down, and groaned when Michael pulled him back on top of him and their cocks pressed together, trapped between their stomachs.

It wasn’t enough, not enough lubrication or pressure, but Alex didn’t have time to think about how to change things or fix it. Michael rolled them so he was on top, covering Alex with his glorious heat, and he nudged Alex’s jaw with his nose so he could kiss Alex’s ear. 

Alex groaned and held onto him, rocking up against him and getting one hand tight in his hair the way he’d figured out Michael loved. And there – Michael hummed like a cat getting the fucking cream, low and satisfied, and fixed his mouth to the underside of Alex’s jaw, kissing a wet, hot line down his throat. 

It was his mouth that drove Alex on, that drove what he was feeling from _not enough_ to almost too much. Alex hooked his residual limb over the back of Michael’s thigh and squeezed his ass, dragging him into hard, slow thrusts that made them both shake. Pressing fingers at Michael’s entrance made him gasp, which made Alex hold him tighter. Michael flicked his tongue against Alex’s ear; Alex moaned much higher than he’d expected, and Michael’s hips stuttered in their rhythm. An endless, inescapable feedback loop that had Alex trembling by the time Michael’s breath hitched, almost a whimper as his cock pulsed in the hot, sticky space between them 

Alex was so close, and the wet heat of Michael’s come smeared between them was helping. He dragged Michael’s head up and kissed him, biting at his slack, blissed-out mouth until Michael kissed back, slowly at first, and then harder when he figured out that was what Alex needed. He ground down as Alex thrust up, and when Alex had to tip his head back and just ride the pleasure as it began to crest, Michael ducked his head to kiss Alex’s ear again. The heat of his tongue, the amplified sound of his ragged breathing, and Alex cried out as he came, eyes squeezed shut and hand so tight in Michael’s hair that it made Michael moan.

Quick and messy weren’t usually things Alex liked in sex, but Michael made him want things he hadn’t known he could want. He rolled his hips through the aftershocks, breathing hard, and swallowed when Michael kissed his chin, then his mouth. They kissed lazily, on and off, breaking apart to breathe and then pressing back together like it hurt not to be kissing. 

It shouldn’t keep getting better like this, that was all Alex could think, heart still racing and skin singing with all the contact. It shouldn’t feel this good. It was insane that something as basic as basically dry humping each other to completion should feel so mind-blowing. It was nonsensical that he should feel so comfortable with Michael lying heavy and hot on top of him, their drying come starting to stick them together.

Michael was the one who kissed his cheek and hummed quietly before asking, “Want me to get a cloth?”

“Yeah.” Alex laughed, and that was something he never usually did in sex either. “Please.”

Michael kissed his cheek again, slightly higher, and they both winced as he pushed himself up and their skin separated with an unpleasant sticky sound. “Ow.” He sounded like he was smiling though, and Alex grinned too, less restrained than he would have been in the light. “Okay, stay there.”

“Mmhm.” Alex shivered when Michael got up, and sat up to straighten out the covers. Michael cleaned himself off first, rinsed the cloth, then leaned back to pass it to Alex. “Thanks.”

Michael yawned and stretched, and Alex pretended he wasn’t watching. He loved how easy Michael was in his own body, how unselfconsciously graceful. He wiped off the mess on his stomach and handed the cloth back to Michael, who rinsed it off again before coming back to bed. He hummed as he lay down, a soft sound of contentment that made Alex’s heart clench, and he had to hold his breath through an odd impulse to choke up when Michael draped an arm over his chest and tucked his forehead against his shoulder.

Alex wanted to turn and kiss the crown of his head. He wanted to say something stupid, like _I love you._ In the end he just reached up to hold onto Michael’s wrist, holding him in place. Michael made another sleepy, contented noise, and his breathing evened out a minute later. Alex lay awake for a while longer, hoping he wouldn’t wake again before daybreak.


	4. Friday 27th August 2021

Alex surfaced out of a confusing dream where he’d been running through a version of Roswell that was wrapped around a tiny, city-sized planet, a gigantic moon and two tiny suns crowding the sky. It was still dark outside, and he was lying on his side, facing Michael. 

Michael’s expression was slack, and Alex gazed at its dim outline in the dark for a few seconds before rolling over to face the other direction, having to shift carefully to keep the sheets over both of them. Behind him, Michael mumbled in his sleep. When Alex steeled himself to curl back against his body, Michael made another quiet sound and looped his arm over Alex’s waist to pull him in.

Alex could feel soft curls on the back of his neck, Michael’s naked body pressed all the way down his, and he fell asleep again almost immediately.

He woke again to a light trailer, Michael still spooning him. Alex didn’t move, and closed his eyes again. He needed to get up to piss, but it wasn’t urgent, and he was so comfortable. He drifted halfway back into sleep after a minute, little almost-dreams floating through his mind. Eventually though, the pressure of his bladder grew too great to ignore and he had to sit up, reluctantly leaving Michael’s warmth behind.

His shorts were crumpled on the floor, and his shirt was scrunched into a ball at the bottom of the bed. Alex retrieved both and put them on before leaning forward to get his clean liner out of his bag. He’d just stood up to click his prosthetic leg into place when Michael groaned behind him. “Alex?”

Alex braced himself before turning around, not that it made a bit of difference when he saw Michael in the pale light filtering through the paper-covered window above him. Sleep-soft with his hair a wild, gravity-defying mess, the sight of him made Alex’s breath catch in his throat for a second. “Morning,” he said after a second. 

“Too early.” Michael yawned and curled up smaller, and it was good that his eyes were closed so Alex didn’t have to worry about suppressing the helpless smile that spread across his face at the sight.

“Okay,” he whispered, and took a second to try and memorise it before he turned away. 

He pissed, brushed his teeth, shaved, and got dressed before he grabbed his phone to check the time. 6:40 wasn’t too early in his book, but it clearly was in Michael’s. If they hadn’t been so far outside town, Alex would have gone to get them coffee and breakfast. As it was, he would have had to borrow Michael’s truck, and he wasn’t sure if that would be allowed.

That wasn’t quite true though. He reflected on it as he went through Michael’s cupboards and overhead lockers, looking for coffee. He was sure Michael would let him borrow his truck. He would probably give Alex the keys and not even give him a warning about keeping it safe. Alex was half tempted to wake him up and ask, just to confirm his suspicions. He wasn’t even sure where the suspicions were coming from, exactly. 

His brain was too sluggish to think on it more than that. He found Michael’s coffee and set the pot going, and in the absence of any reading material of his own, drifted over to a small stack of books on Michael’s table.

They all had titles like _High Energy Astrophysics_ and _The Structure and Evolution of Galaxies_. Alex picked up _Quantum Mechanics: Concepts and Applications_, since it was at the top of the pile, and stared for several seconds at its contents page before closing it again and putting it back. He had absolutely no idea who de Broglie was or what matter waves were, but he was reasonably confident that he wouldn’t figure it out by reading the chapter about it.

“It’s kinda basic,” Michael mumbled, and Alex looked around to see him leaning out of the bed, an amused smile on his face. “Good place to start though, and I got it real cheap.” He wiggled the fingers of his good hand, and Alex resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“You can just say you stole it, Guerin, I’m not gonna be scandalised.” He might have been a little more turned off if Michael hadn’t told him about the other things he’d stolen last night, but stealing things like toothpaste and textbooks hardly made Michael a criminal mastermind. 

“You’re right, I’m the one who should be scandalised.” Michael flopped back into bed and groaned. “It’s like, seven in the morning, Alex. Why are you awake?”

Alex’s lips twitched. “That’s actually a very reasonable time to get up, you know.”

“Not when we don’t have to be anywhere till nine it isn’t.” A huge sigh erupted from behind the divider, and Alex grinned. “You’d better have put on enough coffee for two.”

“I did.”

“Okay. Well, good.”

Alex leaned against the table, staying where he was rather than sitting on Michael’s chair where he would be able to actually see Michael. Seeing Michael would be distracting, he could tell. He made each of them a coffee and kept his eyes averted as he handed Michael his, sitting in the chair that was almost next to the bed now he was a little more fortified against the sight of him.

Michael sat up and slumped against the divider to drink, and Alex snuck a look at him out of the corner of his eye. Michael’s eyes were closed, and his hair…Alex really, really wanted to touch it to see if it was as fluffy as it looked. It looked longer than usual, the curls less defined, with a large section at the front that was flopping out to the side. Michael swept it back over his forehead with a tired sound, and Alex looked away quickly before he could open his eyes.

“Have you seen Mimi since Maria took over the bar?” he asked.

“Give me a second to wake up, man.” Michael smiled though, resting his mug on his knee and rolling his head against the divider to look at Alex. “You feeling okay? Not haunted?”

Alex shook his head. “I’m good. Thanks, for last night.” He could only imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d been on his own. And the sex hadn’t exactly been unwelcome either.

“Any time.” Michael sipped his coffee and sighed. “You said you had a nightmare? You wrote it down.”

“Oh, yeah.” Alex got his phone out and checked his notes. “Wow, I make no sense at all when I’m tired.”

Michael snorted. “What did you say?”

Alex read through the notes and sighed. “Something about hunting you? And you hunting me?”

“You said we weren’t ourselves,” Michael said. “You said that a couple of times. Me but not me, you but not you.”

“Similar strange?” Alex had written that down, but he couldn’t really remember how it fitted in. Maybe it was referencing Roswell, not Michael. “I dreamed of Roswell again this morning,” he muttered, frowning at his phone. “But it was a planet. Like, a tiny planet, small enough to walk all the way around.”

“Small world,” Michael said dryly. “Certainly feels isolated enough to be another planet right now.”

“Aliens,” Alex muttered. “Other planets, and aliens.” He remembered suddenly that he’d had a nightmare his first night in Roswell as well, and flipped back to check his notes from that as well. The memories filtered back as he read them, a few clear images among confused, blurry impressions. “I had nightmares the first night too,” he told Michael. 

“Yeah?”

“Mm.” Less useful though, he realised, more like his usual bad dreams. Running from something only to have his right foot vanish from underneath him, making him crash to the ground. Being a kid again, hiding from his dad. Hearing a car pull up in the driveway and freezing, hands going still on the guitar he was ‘borrowing’ from Flint. Going into a meeting and not understanding why everyone was snickering, treating him like a joke or something freakish and embarrassing, until he caught a glimpse of himself in some mirrored surface and realised he was wearing makeup.

Except, this time, he’d been hiding with Michael.

_Shed into ship,_ he’d written, whatever the hell that meant. _M blocking door. Hammer hand. J underground escape. Huge black sky 2 suns spinny stars. Mind screaming. M says it’s I. Running on foot, D has car, fucked._

He remembered the huge sky, and the stars that had blurred as though he could see the way the planet was spinning through space. Michael blocking the door to the tool shed, Jim Valenti of all people trying to get them to follow him down a tunnel, his dad chasing them down in the desert. “Nothing really useful,” he decided, disappointed, then frowned. “No, hang on – in the dream, we could hear someone screaming, and you told me it was Isobel. That was before you told me about her abilities.”

Michael straightened, awful hope breaking across his face. “You could hear her?”

“No, I couldn’t even tell it was female. It was in my head like feedback on a speaker.”

“That’s what bad haunts sound like to me,” Michael said, twisting to face him properly, crossing his legs on the bed. The sheets covered him from the waist down, and Alex made sure to keep his eyes on his phone. He could see Michael’s bare chest in his peripheral vision, and he didn’t trust himself to keep his eyes on Michael’s face if he looked at him. “You think it means Isobel’s getting in your head?”

“I hope not,” Alex muttered before he could think about it, and winced when he looked up and saw Michael’s hurt expression. “I only mean I don’t like the idea of anyone in my head. But you haven’t felt anything from them, have you?”

Michael shook his head, jaw tight.

“Have you tried?”

“No,” Michael snapped, sarcastic. “That didn’t occur to me, thanks for that genius idea.”

Alex lifted his hands in surrender. “Just checking. You said yesterday you thought you used to be able to communicate non-verbally with them before you were separated, right? Have you ever been able to go back to that?”

Michael shook his head, leaning his shoulder against the divider and curling both hands around his mug before taking a sip. “I think being separated screwed it up,” he said evenly. “Max told me once that they got flashes from me before I came back to Roswell, but they didn’t really understand what they were. I never got anything from them.”

“What about after you came back to town?”

Michael shrugged. “I had better control than them. I kept it locked down. I think they stopped getting anything from me at all, which is what I wanted.”

“Why?”

Michael looked down at his coffee, mouth working for a second before he said, “I didn’t want them to worry.”

Michael could tell when Max and Isobel were hurt, so it made sense that that went both ways. Alex swallowed, eyes on Michael’s left hand. “Did they feel it when my dad…”

“No.”

Alex exhaled slowly. “Okay.”

“What?” Michael glared at him. “Would you want someone else feeling it every time you messed up?”

“You didn’t _mess up_,” Alex snapped, feeling winded. “Jesus, Guerin.” He turned away, furious at himself for getting wound up. “Sorry,” he bit out. “I didn’t, I just mean it wasn’t your fault. It isn’t a kid’s fault when an adult hurts them.”

“You believe that?” Michael didn’t sound accusatory or disbelieving. Alex closed his eyes and took the seconds he needed to parse his tone – curious, kind of sad. 

“When it isn’t about me,” he heard himself say. “It’s easy to believe, yeah.”

“Yeah, well. Same, I guess.”

Alex snorted. “That’s normal, I hear.”

“You go to therapy for this or something?”

“Or something.” Alex reached down to knock on his prosthetic shin. “Therapy is mandatory after a traumatic injury like this. We got off-topic a few times.”

“Did it help?” Curious again, blessedly non-judgemental. It gave Alex the breathing space to nod, even if he still couldn’t look at Michael while he did it.

“Yeah, a bit. For some things. Mostly it just made me realise what a mess I am though.”

Michael laughed. “At least you’re a hot mess, right? That’s what I tell myself, anyway.”

Alex smiled despite himself and looked over at him. “You’re not wrong.”

Michael smirked, cocksure and far too alluring when he still had a pillow crease fading on one cheek. Though maybe that was part of the effect. Alex dragged his gaze away and finished his coffee in a couple of gulps.

“When was the last time you felt anything from Max or Isobel?” he asked, getting them back on track.

Michael shook his head. “Years ago, for both of them. Last time from Max was in high school. Isobel…when she was panicking about Noah proposing.”

“I thought you said they were really happy together?”

“Yeah, but she’s never been able to tell him the truth about herself.” Michael sighed and knocked back the rest of his coffee too. “She loves him, but she knew if she said yes, she’d be committing to a lifetime of lies. Max was against it from the start, but he didn’t wanna say anything. Noah’s a really good guy, y’know? It sucks from all angles. And she was scared he’d want kids at some point, and we don’t know if that’s even possible for us. It was a whole minefield, she was all over the place.”

“And you felt that?” Alex frowned. “How?”

Michael gestured to their surroundings. “I was here, and I just…I don’t know how to explain it, I felt her in my head, freaking out. She was kinda drunk, and Max was already there when I turned up – she’s got a way stronger connection to him than me. But Max is kind of a lot when you’re sober, let alone when you’re a couple of bottles of wine deep into a spiralling session.” He smiled, eyes pained. “She kicked him out, said he wasn’t helping. First time she’s ever wanted me instead of him. So.” He cleared his throat. “It’s kind of an emergencies-only thing.”

“But it isn’t an Isobel-only thing?” Alex asked, checking. “You and Max have a connection separate to her?”

Michael nodded. “Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering if she’s at the centre of this. Like, Isobel specifically.” Alex sighed and shrugged. “Maybe that’s something Maria could help you with though.”

“What?”

“Opening your mind.”

Michael looked apprehensive. “I don’t know.”

“Anything’s worth a shot at this point,” Alex told him. “We need to find the right angle.”

“Angle?”

“There’s always a trigger, with a haunt. There’s always something that either set it off or anchored it in place.” He took a deep breath. “I think I should start looking at the military aspect.”

“Your dad?” Michael leaned back, and Alex shook his head quickly.

“No, not…not yet, not unless we have to. I want to see what I can find on my own first.”

“Can I help?”

“Yes.” It was a relief to say so, and he saw that reflected in Michael’s face. To be doing something was infinitely better than doing nothing. “You have a laptop somewhere, I hope?”

“Yeah, in the bunker. Don’t use it very often, to tell the truth.”

“It’ll do. Do you have any food too?” he added, empty belly making itself known.

Michael grimaced. “There’s chilli?”

“Sure.” Not his ideal breakfast, but he wasn’t fussy. “I’ll heat some of that up, you get your laptop, and we can get started. Probably should put some pants on too,” he added dryly, and his heart leapt when Michael laughed.

They spent the next hour and a half delving into the world of online conspiracy theories. Michael followed Alex’s instructions with ease, but there was just too much information for two people to get through. It would take weeks to filter out the bullshit and find decent leads to follow, and they didn’t have that kind of time.

Especially when Alex had told Michael point-blank that he would stay past his allocated week if he had to. He couldn’t go back on a promise like that; he would never be able to forgive himself. But Michael hadn’t been wrong to worry about the practicalities of something like that. What if they really couldn’t find Max, Isobel, and Noah? Alex would either have to quit his job or set up a permanent base in Roswell, the idea of which made fear pool in the pit of his stomach.

It was one thing to sneak around with Michael while they were focused on an investigation. It would be quite another to settle here, to put down roots and have to start doing things like grocery shopping and laundry, knowing that his dad could be around any corner at any time. Seeing him yesterday morning had been bad enough.

“You go,” Michael said when the time came to go and meet Maria. “Mimi never really knew me anyway, there’s no point in me going. I’ll stay and keep going through all this, you take my truck.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Michael looked around, and Alex jumped as his keys leapt into the air from where they’d been lying on the table. He plucked them out of the air, and grabbed the iron bracelets and anklets as well.

“Okay. Text me if something comes up.”

“Alright.”

The sky was low and heavy with grey clouds in smudged-looking clumps across the horizon, bright white-blue peeking through the gaps. Alex drove out of the junkyard and down the road before pulling over to examine Michael’s keys. Whether it was invasive or weird, he didn’t know, but he knew he wouldn’t make it any further without examining everything.

Michael’s keyring was sparse. There was a key for the truck, for his trailer, and two other house key-types that Alex knew were for Max and Isobel’s houses respectively. There was a small silver key that Alex guessed might be for a mailbox somewhere, a bottle opener, and a small black carabiner. There wasn’t much use for keys when Michael’s mind could unlock anything, Alex supposed.

He checked the truck next, not having had the opportunity to do so under Michael’s eye before. The glove box popped open under Alex’s hand, and he couldn’t stop the incredulous laugh that slipped out when he found the gun inside. He had no idea where Michael had bought it, but he turned it over in his hands and bit his lip to hold back another snort of laughter. 

He wasn’t exactly a gun snob, but he was already trying to figure out a way to make fun of Michael for having a fucking _revolver_ like an old-timey cowboy without revealing that he’d gone looking through his truck. It was loaded, and the only other things in the glove box were a towel, a small box of cartridges, and a mostly-full bottle of nail polish remover. There were no other storage units, not even in the doors, and Alex put the gun back and turned the engine over again.

He didn’t feel like he knew Michael any better, really, but he felt better for having snooped. He’d learned to accept that slightly ugly part of himself a long time ago, and he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d felt guilty about it. Which probably said something about who he was as a person, but he’d accepted that too.

Maria’s red Chevy was already in the parking lot when Alex arrived, and she got out when he parked next to her. “Where’s Guerin?” she asked as he climbed out. 

“He figured Mimi wouldn’t know him anyway, so there wouldn’t be any point in him confusing things by accident.” Alex accepted Maria’s hug. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah, it’s…considerate of him.” She sighed and pulled back, and he squeezed her elbow.

“Are you okay? Yesterday, the leech –”

“I’m fine,” she said dismissively, shaking her head, but he frowned.

“They’re on my blacklist, Maria. I know how horrible they are.”

She clenched her jaw, lips pursed, and looked away for a moment. The wind lifted her hair and blew it across her face, and she tucked it behind her ear with a quick, jerky movement. “Did it make you see…stuff?”

“Leeches bring up your worst memories. Like dementors, but real. And more, like, visceral.”

“So what did it make you see?”

Alex hesitated. “War. When…my leg, when that happened.” 

“You didn’t scream though.” Maria looked a little ashamed of herself for saying it, crossing her arms across her front. “Or anything.”

“Yeah, well.” He looked down, wishing they weren’t having this conversation outside. There was no one around, but he still felt like they were bugged. “Repression. And I realised what the leech was just before it hit me, so.”

She nodded, her hands tightening around her elbows. “I’ve got some rules before we go in.”

“Sure.” Alex nodded, standing up straighter. If she didn’t want to talk about what she’d seen when the leech had caught her, he wasn’t going to press it.

“Okay first, go along with whatever she says. Don’t try and tell her where she really is or what time we’re in – it just upsets her.” Maria took a deep breath. “Two, don’t push. She’ll talk if she wants to, and I don’t want you confusing her.” She waited for him to nod before going on. “Three, don’t get upset in front of her. If she thinks you’re someone else or says something mean, don’t take it personally, okay? She’s sick, she’s not in her right mind.” Her voice was hard and brittle, and Alex wanted to hug her again, but didn’t know how.

“I know,” he said, somewhat lamely, and she nodded.

“Yeah. Okay, let’s go.” She marched into the building like she was going into battle, and when they got to Mimi’s room after signing in, Alex understood why.

If it was hard for him to see the once-vibrant and quick-witted Mimi DeLuca so uncertain and confused, he could only imagine how awful it must be for Maria. She seemed alright at first glance, sitting in a communal living room of sorts watching the TV with another woman on the couch next to her. She looked a little thinner, perhaps, and not as well dressed as Alex remembered her being when he was a kid. But the real change was in the absent way she looked at Maria when she went over to say hello.

“Hey, Mom. How’re you doing?”

“Oh I’m fine, just fine. Lilian’s treating me so well, aren’t you, Lilian?” Mimi turned to the other woman on the couch and smiled at her. Lilian, if that was her name, didn’t react. Mimi didn’t seem perturbed, and smiled up at Maria again. “Can I help you, sweetheart?”

Maria smiled back, and Alex only realised then that Mimi didn’t recognise her. “I brought you a visitor,” Maria said softly. “You wanna come and say hi? Real quick, I promise.”

“Oh sure.” Mimi got to her feet and smiled, wrapping her robe around herself. “I love visitors. Let me grab you guys a drink, hm?”

“That’d be great,” Maria agreed, and gestured behind her back for Alex to follow her. It was a short walk to what Alex could tell was Mimi’s bedroom, where she apparently forgot all about her intention to get them drinks. “Sweetheart, you know you shouldn’t be playing hooky at this time of day,” she scolded. “What’s gotten into you? And you dragged Alex into it as well?” she added, looking at him and shaking her head. “Did something happen?”

“Please, like I could drag Alex into anything,” Maria snorted, lighting up. “Hey, Mom? I just had a real crappy day.”

“Oh, hon.” Mimi tsked and opened her arms, and Maria walked into them and held on tight. Alex breathed slowly and wondered how often Mimi recognised her these days, and how often Maria could ask for hugs like that and receive them. He watched with a familiar sting of envy as Mimi stroked Maria’s hair, and like she always had, Mimi seemed to sense it and opened her arm to beckon him in as well. “Get in here, honey.”

Alex’s smile was completely involuntary, and he let her fold him against her side and wrapped his arms around her and Maria in turn. “Hi, Mimi.”

“Hi, he says,” Mimi huffed. “As if I don’t see you practically every day. Did you have a bad day too?”

“Something like that.” She smelled different, of a plainer, harsher brand of shampoo, the absence of perfume startling. He hadn’t remembered how much she’d worn until its absence slapped him in the face.

“I wish you could get on with that Valenti boy again,” Mimi sighed. “He used to be such a sweet kid.”

Alex laughed, a little choked. “Yeah. Used to be.” In Mimi’s mind, he was still in high school, that much was clear. Sometime before graduation, after Kyle had turned on him.

“You should find him again.” Mimi pulled back and slid her arm up to grip his shoulder, frowning at him. “People change, you know. And your fathers are such good friends, it’d be a shame if you two didn’t make up.”

So before Kyle had really started being an asshole then. Mimi had stopped sighing over their lost friendship pretty quick once she’d heard about the shit Kyle was putting Alex through at school.

“It’s up to Kyle,” Alex told her, a little surprised at how sharp the old sting of rejection still was. He’d buried it deep, but it was still there. “He’s the one with the problem. I didn’t wanna talk about him though.”

Mimi smiled and looked at Maria, her attention sliding off him like water off a feather. “Sweetheart, how’s the bar doing?”

“It’s doing great, Mom,” Maria assured her. “Everything’s going great. And Alex has come back to visit, isn’t that great?”

“Don’t patronise me,” Mimi said, suddenly sharp. “I can see him standing there, clear as day.” She glanced in Alex’s direction, but this time there was no warmth in her expression at all. “Don’t often see you these days, Master Sergeant.”

Alex’s heart seized. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” She gave him a look she’d never given him before, cold and assessing. “How’s Dawn and the kids?”

Maria’s eyes were wide, and Alex reminded himself of her rules. So he swallowed and said, “They’re fine,” as if it didn’t make his skin crawl to know that Mimi was looking at him and seeing his father.

“And Jim?” Mimi’s lip curled. “You know Michelle’s this close to kicking him out, don’t you? She thinks he’s cheating again, all the time he’s spending with you. You oughta be careful, Master Sergeant.”

“What of?” Alex asked, feeling cold. The world outside Mimi’s window seemed to be shivering, blurring, and he felt unsteady on his legs all of a sudden, feeling the absence of his right foot like the loss was fresh.

Mimi narrowed her eyes and stepped away from him, then frowned. “Alex?”

Alex exhaled heavily, and Maria nodded, taking Mimi’s arm. “It’s Alex, Mom. He’s visiting home.”

“Alex? Oh, sweetie.” Mimi lifted her arms, and Alex’s heart felt like it was going a mile a minute as he let her pull him into a tight, warm hug. The emotional whiplash was going to kick his ass later, but right now he needed to focus. 

“Good to see you too, Mimi,” he murmured, hugging her back. He’d take what he could get, at this point.

“Let me look at you.” She leaned back and took his face in her hands, a sad smile on her face. “Alex Manes, all grown up. I haven’t seen you in years, have I? Mind’s all over the place these days, those damn aliens screwing with me worse than ever.”

“Aliens?” Alex repeated, before he remembered that Maria had told him Mimi believed in them these days.

“In my head.” Mimi tapped her temple with a wry look. “In yours too, I’ll bet. They’ll be aligning their ships soon, you just wait. But it’s their telepathic abilities you’ve really got to watch out for. You have to be careful, Alex.”

“I’m always careful,” Alex lied.

“Oh, says the man who only came home with one leg!” Mimi tsked. “You oughta take more care of yourself, sweetheart. You been by the Pony yet?”

“First thing I did when I got back to town.” Alex smiled at Maria, who smiled back, the hint of tears in her eyes.

Mimi laughed, pleased. “Damn straight. You can drink now and everything! Maria –” She turned around and reached for Maria, looping her arm through hers. “Maria looks good, doesn’t she? My baby girl, all grown up.”

Alex smiled at both of them. “She looks amazing. So much like you, too.”

“Oh!” Mimi laughed and squeezed his arm. “Keep up that flattery, I like a man with a sweet mouth. Come sit, come on.” 

The moment they were sat down, it was like she forgot Alex was there. They sat in a line on her bed, Maria in the middle, and Mimi held onto her daughter’s hands and talked about things Alex didn’t understand – the bar’s accounts, the recent marital problems of a man called Jojo, Maria’s teenage obsession with saving the planet – and Maria went along with all of it, holding onto Mimi and switching effortlessly along the timelines with her.

It was kind of mesmerising to listen to. No matter where Mimi’s mind went, Maria followed. Even when Mimi thought she was a customer, Maria went along with it. It was worth the confusing parts, Alex supposed, for the brief moments when Mimi did flick back to something close to the present. 

He concentrated on Mimi and Maria so he would pay less attention to the occasional buzz of invisible flies. He was catching the occasional whiff of smoke too, and the sky he could see out of the window looked wrong. Not in any way he could define – just wrong. The hostility pressed at him, made him want to hide, but he focused on Maria, counted the rings on her fingers and listened to Mimi tell her about protecting herself from the telepathic aliens.

It felt dangerous, letting Mimi say such things out loud. Alex rubbed his forehead, trying to rationalise his way through the paranoia, but before he could get any further Mimi was reaching across to take his hand, frowning in concern. “Alex, you have a worried face.”

Alex sighed and managed a small smile. “Kind of my default right now.”

“It shouldn’t be.” Mimi rubbed her thumb along the back of his hand. “You deserve better than that, you know. You look too much like your father right now.”

Alex felt Maria stiffen between them, and laid a hand on her back where Mimi couldn’t see, reassuring her that it was alright. “Well that sucks,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “I was hoping the rage face would skip a generation.”

Mimi shook her head, frowning now. “No, it’s not that. You know, I’ve known Jesse my whole life? And I remember the day he learned too much. I could see it in him like I see it in you now, in your aura, like it was in his.”

Alex blinked. “What do you mean, when he learned too much?”

“Something broke in this town once.” Mimi’s gaze was a little unfocused, fixed somewhere Alex couldn’t pinpoint. “Long ago. The pieces shattered.” Her eyes flicked to his, and he was startled by their intensity. “We aren’t meant to touch things from another world,” she told him in a low, serious voice. “It creeps into us, and it makes us ugly inside. Don’t let it do to you what it did to your father, Alex. What it did to Jimmy Valenti.” Her voice wobbled, and Alex gripped her hand, breath catching.

“Jim Valenti?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into,” Mimi shook her head and squeezed his hand back, looking down at them. “That poor man. And his poor family – you know he cheats on his wife? It’s terrible. But we have to keep these secrets.” She looked up and let go of Alex with one hand to take Maria’s. “People can be bad enough as it is, without them thinking we’ll go around spilling their secrets. You know how much infidelity a bartender sees? It’s exhausting.”

“It is,” Maria agreed quietly.

“And his son idolises him, of course. And you always liked him better than your father.” Mimi looked back at him with a wry smile that he couldn’t help returning.

“It’s not like my dad was a fantastic role model. At least Jim was nice to me.”

“His heart’s too big.” Mimi shook his head. “It’s going to get him in trouble one day. He loves too much, too easily.” She shivered. “Ooh, it’s getting cold. This building’s haunted, you know.”

Alex jumped at the opening. “This whole town’s haunted right now, Mimi. Can you feel it?”

“Can’t so much, these days.” She sighed and tapped her temple like she had before. “I’m like a faulty radio mast.”

“Would it help if you had your necklace back?” Alex asked, ignoring Maria’s wide-eyed look. Mimi shook her head anyway.

“No, that’s Maria’s now. You protect the people you love, you know that.” She smiled and reached out to touch Alex’s cheek gently. “You take care of each other. Maria’s my daughter, and I’ll do anything for her.” She transferred that smile to Maria, who smiled tremulously back.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. That’s why I gave you the necklace.” She touched the pendant resting below Maria’s collarbone. “It’s our family’s protection. You come from a line of strong women, protecting other strong women. We take care of our own, and that’s what’s most important in this world. My baby.” She leaned back and smiled, so proud that it made Alex’s heart ache. “Oh, you’ve grown up so well.” She looked at Alex and her smile took on a smug edge. “I did pretty well, huh?”

Maria pulled her into a tight hug. “You did amazingly,” she mumbled into her hair, and Mimi closed her eyes and rubbed her back.

A loud buzz whipped past Alex’s ear, and he froze so he wouldn’t flinch. Mimi noticed though, and pulled back from Maria. “That looked like a haunted face if ever I saw one. What’s the problem, hon?”

It was her impersonal voice, and Alex buried the sadness of not being recognised and focused on the problem at hand. “Just a buzz,” he told her. “But I’ve been noticing haunts all around town. Can you feel anything weird, Mimi?”

“Hm. Let me try.” She folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. She was so young still, not a grey hair on her head, barely a line on her face. She’d been a young mother, Alex knew that, but it was still horrible realising how much longer she was going to live, knowing her mind was only going to deteriorate further. She sighed and frowned, forehead creasing. “You’re right,” she murmured. “There’s a lot of activity.”

“Can you tell where it’s focused?” Alex asked. “Where the nexus is?”

Mimi snorted, eyes still closed. “What are you, some sort of shade? A nexus, please. No, this isn’t something natural you can come at with your little blessings and banishings.” She opened her eyes and gave Alex a distinctly unimpressed look. “This is way out of your league, shade. Better call in the cavalry and get out of town while you can.”

“Why?”

“You can rely on the good old Air Force,” Mimi murmured, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling. “That’s what I call a close encounter. They’ll take care of the aliens, you just wait and see. They’re not natural, you know.” She looked at him again, expression hard. “They’re not human, even if they look it. They warp the natural way of things, they get in your head and twist it out of shape. You think I don’t know where I am?” Again, she tapped her temple. “You think I don’t know who put me here? We aren’t meant to touch things from another world, Alex. It’s a darker energy than the human mind and body can tolerate. It hurts us, it twists us up.” Her gaze slipped away again, and she got to her feet and went to look out of the window. 

“Mom?” Maria got up to follow her, and Alex went to stand as well, not sure what to do. A wave of dizziness swept through him for a second, and he had to close his eyes and sit back down heavily, squeezing his eyes shut as his vision went dark at the edges.

“You see those, there?” Mimi said. “In the tree. Crows are an ill omen, especially when they’re not real.”

“What do they mean?” Alex asked, forcing his eyes open. He fixed them on the back of Mimi’s head and tried standing again, and this time he managed it. He’d heard of haunts that affected people’s balance, but he’d never had it happen to him. It was deeply unpleasant. 

“Bad luck,” Mimi said absently, and Alex staggered backwards as the light in the room seemed to dim and Mimi turned around while still staying still, and her face was wrong, it was wrong – “**Being watched,**” she said, and Alex couldn’t see her eyes. He closed his own as his back hit the wall, bringing his hands up to cover his face. He needed to stop her getting in his head, he needed to protect himself.

“Alex? Shit, Alex, what’s wrong?”

Maria. Alex swallowed irrational terror and opened his eyes under his palms first before lowering his hands. “A haunt,” he croaked. “It’s fine, I’m fine.” He didn’t dare look at Mimi. It was like when he’d woken up from his nightmare this morning and been too afraid to look at Michael. He was scared of what he might not see.

“You really don’t look fine.” Maria came closer, and he took a deep breath before looking at her. Over her shoulder, Mimi had turned back around to face the window. Or had she always been looking out of it? Alex wasn’t sure, and that freaked him out almost more than the haunt itself had.

“I think it’s getting to me.” Alex dragged a smile onto his face, trying to seem unaffected. “The town, I mean.”

“You want me to call Guerin?”

“Nah. I’ve got his truck, remember? He wouldn’t be able to get out here before I get back there anyway.”

Maria glanced over her shoulder, then lowered her voice and came closer, a tiny smirk playing at her mouth. “Back to his trailer? Did you spend the night?”

“Try for a moment to entertain the idea of how much worse I would be feeling if I’d had even less sleep than I got,” Alex said dryly. “Michael’s better at dispelling the effects of haunts than I am. It made sense to stay close.”

“Did it?” Maria sounded entirely too amused, and he huffed and reached out to shove gently at her arm.

“Shut up.”

“So did you talk to him?”

“A little.” Alex sighed, slumping against the wall. “We’ve always had terrible timing, I guess. I don’t want to ask about anything serious while he’s so freaked out about Max and Isobel being missing.”

“He didn’t seem very freaked out yesterday,” Maria pointed out, and Alex shook his head.

“He’s compressing, I think. He said he panicked last week when he realised they were gone, and he panicked a bit last night about how much progress we _haven’t_ made, but he shut it down pretty quick.”

“Takes one to know one, I guess. You repress like a champ as well,” Maria explained when Alex gave her a quizzical look.

He snorted. “Like you don’t.”

“Kind of a necessity in this day and age.” She sighed and looked over her shoulder. “You wanna keep trying?”

“No.” Alex sighed. “Are you staying?”

“I’ll stay for a bit. Come and say goodbye.”

Alex hung back as Maria went over to touch Mimi’s shoulder. “Mom?”

Mimi gave her a blank look, and then a customer service smile. “What can I get you, hon?”

Maria sighed, but smiled. “I’m good, actually. Alex is just leaving now, okay?”

When Mimi looked at him, there was no recognition in her eyes at all, and that was almost worse than the haunted, eyeless version of her he’d seen a minute ago. “Okay,” she said, unconcerned. “Come again soon, alright?”

“Sure thing.” Alex took a deep breath and pushed off from the wall. “It was really good to see you, Mimi.”

She smiled, and for a second he thought she saw him, and then it was gone again. “See you soon. We’re open three to one, every day but Sunday.”

He gave her and Maria one last, slightly shaky smile, and saw himself out. The haunt seemed to have really gotten through a crack in his armour. On his way out of the building, he heard sobbing from an empty room, saw a definitely incorporeal trio of spiders scuttling after a nurse, and felt an icy breeze that didn’t have any effect on his clothes whistle down the hallway. He signed out, ignoring the way the receptionist was scratching absently at her arms, and went to sit in Michael’s truck.

It seemed quieter in there. Whether that was because Michael had spent so much time in it wasn’t a theory he could verify, but it was a relief nonetheless. He dug his phone out of his pocket and called him, winding the window down to let in some air as he did.

Michael picked up on the second ring. “Alex?”

“Yeah. I’m done here, heading back. You want me to get anything on the way? Food? Coffee?”

“Nah, I’m good. Did you get anything useful?”

“Not much. Maybe, I’m not sure. I’ll tell you in person.”

Michael snorted. “Cryptic.”

“That’s me,” Alex said sarcastically. “See you soon.” He hung up before either of them had to figure out whether or how to say goodbye, and started making notes on everything he could remember Mimi saying. There was no telling how much of it was nonsense and how much could be useful, but he preferred having it written down so he wouldn’t forget anything.

He was almost twitching from the feeling of being watched by the time he hit the main road outside the residential home. It was like there was a sniper on his trail, and he could feel the circle of their scope around his head. That, paired with all the little haunts he kept sensing on the way back kept him seriously on edge.

A gigantic black stag walked behind a row of single-storey houses, its eyes blazing white, its antlers taller than the power cables. The clouds seemed to be changing too quickly, and taking on odd colours when Alex saw them out of the corner of his eye. Whenever he looked directly at them, the odd glimmer of purple or green wouldn’t be there. He saw a ghost veiled in white step out into the road and jumped so badly that he almost caused an accident. It vanished as soon as a car went through it, but Alex had thought for a split second that it had been another leech.

Once he’d had that thought, it wouldn’t leave him alone. There was no way that in the state Roswell was in, there would only be one leech in the town. Another could be waiting right around the next corner, and Alex wouldn’t know until he was already reliving his worst memories. He slowed down, barely meeting the speed limit, and tried to just keep his eyes on the road.

He had to force himself not to barge straight into the trailer when he got back to the junkyard, and knocked instead, knuckles hard on the hot exterior. He heard movement inside, and stood back when Michael flung the door open and blinked down at him like he was surprised to see him. “Hey.” He frowned. “Hey, you don’t look so good.”

So much for appearing calm. “You say that to all the guys?”

“Alex.” Michael reached out and grabbed his wrist. The twitchy feeling receded, and Alex shuddered. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Let me in, Guerin.” He needed to have a wall between him and the outside world, even if that wall was as thin as the trailer’s. And maybe Michael could tell, because he kept hold of Alex’s wrist to help him up and in. Alex twisted his wrist in Michael’s grip to hold onto him in return, allowing the assistance for once. 

“So nothing useful from DeLuca senior?” Michael asked, reaching past him to pull the door closed. His thumb swept a warm line up the inside of Alex’s forearm before he let go, and Alex had to turn away, not wanting any reaction he had to be visible. Which was ridiculous, they’d literally had sex last night, but still. Still.

“Not much.” He sat down in the armchair and levered his phone out of his pocket with one hand. “But who knows? She talked about aliens, but – whoa, calm down.” He raised his eyebrows as Michael, who had been leaning against the kitchen unit, jerked as if he’d been shocked. “Not real aliens, I’m pretty sure.”

“You’re _pretty sure?_” Michael gave him an incredulous look. “Not exactly filling me with confidence here, Alex.”

“Well let me get more than two words out before you start panicking and maybe you’ll feel better,” Alex said sarcastically. “She thinks Independence Day really happened, Guerin. She’s not exactly in her right mind.” It hurt, knowing Mimi as well as he once had, to see the way Michael relaxed a little at that. It hurt to realise that what he’d just said sounded dismissive, almost cruel. He didn’t want to refer to Mimi as sick or deluded – he didn’t want to think of her like that. He didn’t want his first thoughts of her to be of how confused and strange she’d been in her little room in Sunset Mesa Assisted Living Facility. 

“Okay.” Michael sat down on the other chair. “Go on.”

“Save freak-outs and questions for the end, okay?” Alex looked back down at his phone. “She talked about aliens, mostly the Independence Day kind. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but she mentioned the dangers of telepathic aliens a lot, which obviously made me think of your sister. Save it,” he added warningly when Michael opened his mouth. He waited until Michael glared but closed it, and nodded before continuing.

“She said Maria’s necklace would protect her from the alien threat as well as the supernatural one, which I thought was kind of interesting, even if it’s probably nonsense. She talked about my dad a little bit.”

“She knows him?”

“What part of ‘save it’ was unclear?” Alex asked, raising an eyebrow. Michael made a face, but settled again. “They knew each other,” Alex told him. “She knew him growing up, said she could tell the day he ‘learned too much’, because his aura changed, and she compared it to mine. When I asked her about the hauntings, she said she couldn’t tell at first, because her mind was so scrambled. She was lucid, occasionally.” He took a quick breath and pretended he was at a briefing. Information was to be relayed swiftly and without emotion. “She said when I pushed her that I was out of my league, and it wasn’t a natural haunting. She mentioned the Air Force, but that might’ve been an Independence Day reference. She mentioned the danger of other worlds a couple of times, and how they got under your skin and corrupted you. She mentioned Jim Valenti, in that regard.” Alex frowned and looked up at Michael. “Do you know anything about his death?”

Michael shrugged. “Cancer, I heard. Must’ve come on fast – he was at work one day, then boxed up a few weeks later. Kyle Valenti came back for the whole thing.” His lip curled. “Hung around ever since, it feels like. And his mom’s the Sheriff now, but you knew that.”

It took Alex a second to absorb that. “Kyle’s in Roswell?”

“Yeah. I don’t see him round much – I guess the Pony’s a bit beneath him these days, fancy doctor that he is.”

“He’s a doctor.” Alex wasn’t above letting his petty disgruntlement come through, especially when it made Michael grin. “Ugh. God.”

“Still a jock too,” Michael said, with the air of someone delivering bad news but getting a bit of a kick out of it at the same time. “He _jogs_, like, daily.”

Alex made a sound of pure disgust. “What an asshole.” He caught Michael’s eye and started to laugh. “Shut up, what’s so funny?”

“He’s such an asshole,” Michael agreed, laughing too. “He’s a fucking peacock, running around just like he used to, showing off like he thinks he just stepped off a fucking runway.”

“Leopards and spots,” Alex snorted, shaking his head. “Ugh. Well, I hope I don’t bump into him.”

“You could kick his ass if he starts anything,” Michael said cheerfully. “I mean, you could when we were kids too, but people would absolutely kill him if he tried to be a dick to a vet.”

“Shit, I guess going to war and getting half a leg blown off would be worth it if I could ruin Kyle Valenti’s social credit in Roswell, New Mexico.” Alex laughed, but Michael only smiled, the expression a little strained at the edges.

So apparently that was something he would have to tiptoe around a bit. Which wasn’t exactly thrilling, but Alex could live with it. He took a breath and looked down at his phone again. “I hoped she’d be more useful, to be honest. I didn’t know she was so bad.”

“Did she know who you were?”

“Only some of the time. I don’t know anything about Alzheimer’s or whatever this is, but it was so fast.” Alex shook his head. “It was like she’d switch time zones between blinks. She didn’t recognise me, then she did, then she wouldn’t again, she thought I was maybe fourteen for a couple of minutes…she thought I was my dad at one point.” He gave a harsh laugh. “I preferred it when she didn’t recognise me.”

Michael, when he looked up, was frowning in something like confusion. “You don’t look anything like him.”

Alex shrugged, though hearing Michael say it did lift a little of the weight in his chest. “I guess it’s more obvious from her side. She’s known him her whole life, so she knew him when he was my age, and younger. I guess there must be some family resemblance.”

Michael shook his head. “Nah. Seriously, you don’t look alike at all.”

“We do though.” Alex swallowed. “Same nose. Same shape lips. It’s less obvious because I’m darker, but our eyes have the same sorta shape to them too.”

“Yeah, but his are cold and dead like a shark’s,” Michael said sharply. “Yours aren’t. You’re nothing like him, Alex.”

He was, but he didn’t really want to keep arguing about it. He cleared his throat. “We should check out the town a bit more together. I want to figure out a system for how you see things compared to me.”

“What, like a Manes-Guerin Scale?” Michael smiled slightly. “Categories with numbers and letters?”

“Well I want something a bit more solid than fuzz and haze,” Alex said, raising an eyebrow. “No offence.”

Michael just shrugged. “Whatever you want, man. I’m out of ideas at this point.”

No pressure then. Alex nodded to the laptops on the table. “Did you find anything?”

“Nothing useful. Lotta cranks and conspiracy theorists.” Michael gave them a dismissive gesture. “Military gets mentioned a whole lot, surprise surprise.”

“Makes sense.” Alex hesitated. “Anything that matched up with what you already know about the crash?”

Michael lifted a shoulder, somehow managing to make a shrug look annoyed. “Not much. Just a lot of crazy people raving.”

“You said you found some of the stuff from your bunker online,” Alex said cautiously.

“Found a lot of junk too.” Michael shook his head. “I had a look, haven’t turned anything up yet.”

“Okay.” Alex touched the bracelet on his left wrist, rubbing his thumb along the rough metal. “Wanna head out now then?”

“Sure.” Michael sighed and stood up. “You still got my keys?”

“Oh, yeah.” Alex stood up and handed them over, and followed Michael when he left the trailer.

The problem, Alex realised pretty much instantly, was that if they lingered for any length of time in any one spot, they looked fucking weird. Two men in a scruffy old Chevy pickup hanging around and doing nothing besides watching life go by just looked weird. Neither of them suggested going to Roswell High, well aware of how much worse that would look.

The other problem was that Alex couldn’t quite face the idea of getting out and sitting somewhere public with Michael either. Bad enough that he had such a distinctive truck – the idea of anyone seeing them and thinking _date_ or anything even close to that ballpark made his skin crawl. He hadn’t felt so paranoid about being out with a guy since before DADT had been repealed.

On the upside, they really didn’t need to stay in one place for more than ten minutes or so, because the haunts were so thick.

Alex took notes on his phone, trying to hammer out a decent system for describing what Michael experienced compared to him. The most annoying thing was the way their senses weren’t synched to receive the supernatural in the same way. So while Michael might hear a high-pitched ringing coming from a parking meter (of all things), Alex would see blood dripping off of it instead. Michael would see a patch of haze thicken in the air, and Alex would smell foetid water. Sometimes they both at least saw things – Michael nudged Alex and nodded towards a couple walking down the sidewalk hand in hand, not speaking. “Haze around the woman,” he said, and Alex squinted at her for a moment before he realised that she didn’t have a shadow. And of course Michael saw and heard things that Alex didn’t sense at all.

The way Michael described it, being in the historic centre of town was like being surrounded by a mist with foggy patches, with a constant background hum of staticky whining. Alex went into a store to buy a map, and had to avoid meeting the eyes of the guy behind the counter as he paid because he was suddenly convinced that if he looked, the man wouldn’t have a face, or it would look somehow wrong if he did.

He held his wrist out to Michael as he got back in the truck, and Michael pressed his palm to it for a brief moment. The tension in Alex’s body receded, and he sighed, unfolding the map across his lap. “Gotta say, alien brains are definitely proving superior in this regard.”

Michael’s lips twitched. “What d’you mean?”

“The lack of pressure on your hindbrain, or whatever. You’re unshadowed.”

“Unshadowed.” Michael grinned. “Haven’t heard it called that for a while.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not a scientific term, is it?” Alex got a green biro out of his backpack and tapped it against the paper thoughtfully. “Do you think the centre has a boundary of its own?”

“Not the same way the town itself does.” Michael leaned over to look at the map, and Alex moved it to be more on the seat between them. “Can I?” he asked, pointing to the pen. Alex handed it over and Michael twirled it around his fingers a couple of times before tracing the capped end in a circle around the historic centre. “Thickest here, I think. It’d be easier if we got out and walked it.”

“I know.” Alex worked his jaw when Michael waited, then looked up at him expectantly. “I know,” he said again. “It’s the paranoia, it’s pushing me pretty hard.”

“We could hold hands?” Michael grinned. It faded when Alex shook his head.

“That would make it worse. That’s the way with these things, y’know? Or, I guess you don’t.” He sat back and frowned at Michael. He knew the knowledge gap was there, but he still kept tripping into it. “When you get called out on jobs, the people who call you, they’re shadowed, right? They’re being influenced?”

“Sure.”

“You know it screws people up, right?”

“Yeah.” Michael looked down at the map again. “Intellectually. I get it, but I’ve never actually experienced it, so.”

“Have you ever been scared of haunts?” Alex asked, genuinely curious. “Like, even when you were a kid. You must’ve watched horror films, so you know what we’re primed to be afraid _of_.”

“Yeah.” Michael frowned, slumping back in his seat and spinning the pen round his fingers again. Alex watched, a little mesmerised. Michael moved it over and under his fingers neatly in a smooth unending cycle. “But…I don’t know. I don’t remember when I figured out that when other people saw spooky shit and got shadowed, I saw things differently. I just always knew. Did you ever go out by the old reservoir in Border Hill?”

Alex grimaced. “Where those kids drowned?”

Michael gave him a wry look. “That’s the one. Isobel went there once with a few of her friends, you know, kids playing dare and stuff.”

Alex nodded. He’d done the same with Kyle, when they were maybe ten or eleven. He’d felt the not-really-there water on his face and freaked out, bolting back to the road. Kyle hadn’t felt anything, of course, and he’d told his dad, who’d told Alex’s dad, who’d driven him back out there at night to face his fears. He’d parked up in his station wagon and told Alex in that calm, low voice of his that if he didn’t go up to the edge of the reservoir and bring him back a full bottle of water, he’d wish he’d drowned too.

It had been a strong haunt. The ghosts themselves had manifested and everything, and Alex had felt the water in his mouth and wept in silent terror as the indistinct forms of the children – teenagers, taller than him, who’d jumped in while drunk and drowned because they couldn’t get out – loomed over him. Their despair and fear had been so strong Alex had barely managed to make it to the water. But his fear of his dad’s punishment was greater than his fear of ghosts, in the end, and he brought the bottle back, full and dripping.

He’d been so scared he’d pissed himself, and his dad had made him walk home. It had taken him hours, too ashamed to knock on a door and ask for directions. And then his dad had punished him for being late. He didn’t remember how, exactly. That sort of stuff blurred over the years.

Michael was still talking, and Alex forced himself to listen.

“– had to pretend she just couldn’t see or hear anything, because obviously what she was seeing wasn’t anything like what her friends were seeing. Apparently one of the ghosts touched her, and she didn’t even notice.” Michael laughed. “They all thought she was the most insensitive person they’d ever seen. But it’s like…I don’t know, even in horror movies, I know none of it would ever be scary for me in real life, so it doesn’t really have the same effect. It’s different for Max,” he added slowly. “But he’s always had way more of an imagination.”

“You’ve actually experienced fear in your life though,” Alex said dryly. “I won’t believe you if you say otherwise.”

“Sure, but like…what you can’t sense can’t hurt you, right? And I know that isn’t actually true –”

“Not even remotely.” Alex hated that saying. The people who said it were always insensitive in the extreme, in all senses of the word.

“But it’s similar. I know it’s like…like being out on your own in the desert and you hear a noise, and you go on high alert. I know people experience shadowings like that. That’s how I imagine it. But it’s like how some people are scared of snakes and some people just aren’t.” He shrugged. “Except I see snakes as distortions.”

“What are you afraid of?” Alex asked, shaking his head at him. “What puts you on high alert?”

Michael sucked his teeth, and Alex regretted asking such a personal question for a second before his curiosity overwhelmed him. He wanted to hear what Michael had to say. “Getting caught,” he said finally. “The idea of getting caught is what scares me most. Max and Isobel too. I’m not scared of ghosts and ghasts going bump in the night – I’m scared of men in hazmat suits with tranq guns. I don’t wanna be anyone’s lab experiment.”

Alex could have kicked himself. Obviously Michael, Max, and Isobel would be scared of being turned into science experiments. How could they not be? “Makes sense,” he said, a completely inadequate response. Michael just shrugged.

“Exactly. And it makes sense for human brains to be hardwired to fear haunts, because they can actually hurt you. They can’t even touch me. Can’t get in my head or hurt me at all, so.” He shrugged again and leaned over to tap the pen against the map. “Anyway. You wanna draw out, like, ghostly topography on this thing?”

“Haunt contours,” Alex said, refusing to be embarrassed at his automatic correction of Michael’s vocabulary. Ghosts were different to haunts, and after becoming a shade it had start to actively annoy him when people mixed them up like they meant the same thing, even if he rarely said so. “Not all haunts are ghosts.”

“Pedant.” Michael shot him a quick grin. “Fine, haunt contours. Thickest…roughly here, I guess.” He drew a line with the cap of the pen around the centre. “You wanna be really specific, we should get out and walk it.”

“Yeah.” If Alex let himself think about it, he would get his irrational fears all twisted up inside him again, so he just nodded and turned to get out of the truck. “Let’s go.”

Michael made a surprised noise, but got out as well, digging in his pocket for change for the meter. Alex folded the map up so the centre was on the outside in the middle, and hoped like hell that everyone would just think they were tourists. He remembered assuming when he was a kid that anyone with a map in Roswell was a tourist, so it was probably a safe bet.

It took longer than Alex had expected just to walk around the historic centre a few times. They switched from pen to pencil pretty much immediately, Michael having the stub of one in his wallet of all places. “Habit,” he just said when Alex raised his eyebrows. 

The sheer volume of haunts slowed them to a crawl. Even discounting everything that was clearly attached to specific people, like the woman from before lacking a shadow, every building had something wrong with it. In the first five minutes, they passed a dry goods store, a café, a jewellery store, and a bank.

The dry goods store stank of rotten food to Alex. Michael saw it as thick haze, and they both got a surprise when they saw the ants scurrying along in the crack where the sidewalk met the brick. “They’re not haunted though, right?” Michael muttered. “They’re just ants.”

“Yeah, and those are just flies.” Alex nodded at the flies trapped on the inside of the window. There were a lot more dead ones crowding the bottom than he would have expected. “Corporeal effect of a haunt, basically. Haunts can attract unshadowed things to them. That’s how you get actual vermin in your house and actual mould on your walls even if you never normally would.”

“Gross.”

“Yep. It’s a strong haunt that pulls in the local wildlife though. I’ve only ever seen it happen a few times, and it’s usually something really nasty like a poltergeist or a knocker.”

Michael squinted. “Knockers are…the ones who try to kill children?”

“That’s rawheads,” Alex corrected. “Knockers target adults and animals. And they’re more destructive than rawheads and poltergeists – they’re the ones who usually cause the most property damage.”

“So many different names,” Michael huffed. “They’re all the same thing.”

“Different behaviours require different approaches.” Alex jerked his head and they moved on. 

The café gave off an aura of despair so strong it made Alex have to pinch himself to stay focused. Michael heard that as a distorted ringing in his ears. The jewellery store’s window displays were as tarnished and dirty-looking as Ann Evans’ necklace and earrings had been the day before. Michael didn’t see any specific haze around the jewellery: just a low-level fuzz around the whole store. The bank was blasting cold out onto the sidewalk so strongly that walking past it felt like Alex was walking through a freezer. Michael only saw the same fuzz as he had around the jewellery store.

“Jesus.” Alex shivered violently and went to stand in a patch of sunlight to try and warm up as he noted down the differences in what they’d seen on his phone. Michael leaned against the wall next to him, looking over his shoulder. 

“It kind of sucks that you get such different experiences even when I’m seeing the same level of haze,” he said. 

“Yeah. Makes it hard to figure out categories with neat numbers and letters,” Alex said dryly. “Let’s keep going.”

He forced himself to continue until they’d combed the centre three times, figuring out a rough boundary where the haunts became somewhat less extreme. It was the afternoon when the clouds overhead broke and Michael finally dragged him into a diner and pushed him towards an empty booth. “You look like death,” he muttered, sitting opposite him when Alex lowered himself onto the vinyl seat, both of them a little damp from the rain.

“I feel fine,” he lied. He felt shadowed as hell, but food would help. “Hey, have you ever tried eating haunted food?”

Michael laughed, grabbing a menu. “Haunted food?”

They paused as a waitress came over with a coffee pot ready, bright smile in place, and they waited for her to leave before Michael leaned in and whispered again, grinning, “Haunted food?”

Alex couldn’t quite hold back his smile. “Yeah, Guerin, you’ve never heard of that? Possessed people cooking up poisonous meals is a pretty common horror story.”

“Yeah, a _story._ Gotta say, I’ve never come across it and I figured it was bullshit. Like séances and saints.”

Alex shrugged. “I’ve had haunted food before. By mistake, but it was definitely shadowed.”

“When?” Michael sounded fascinated. “What happened?”

“Not too long ago actually, only back in April. Job was a curse, or that’s what the clients thought, and it looked that way for a few days till I ate half a cake the middle kid had made. Turned out she was being ridden – I’d figured it was one of the kids, but the haunt was pretty benign.”

“You’re totally skating around this, you know that?” Michael rolled his eyes. “Is this about client confidentiality or something? Just make up names for them.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Fine. Let’s call the family the…I don’t know, the Smiths, middle kid was called Molly. Molly was having a hard time for some reason and a haunt that had already been dormant in the house woke up and latched onto her. She baked cakes, everyone who ate them felt very lonely and wanted to cry. It was a real trip.”

“Wow.” Michael tipped his head on one side. “You think ghosts can really talk to people through Ouija boards too?”

Alex’s lips twitched. “You know they can.”

“Okay but _talk_ talk, like a real person, not just an imprint. Gotta say, actual ghosts are the only things that I don’t get about the whole supernatural energy field, or whatever it is. What’d you call it? The something theory?”

“Kawamura,” Alex realised, and shrugged. “Yeah, ghosts are on a long list of things that can’t be explained. Maybe they never will be, y’know? That’s why I can’t see shades being put out of business by machines any time soon.” He scanned the menu as he saw the waitress approaching again. “Lunch is on me, by the way.”

Michael’s smile shuttered. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.” Alex met his eyes calmly. “You let me stay over and fed me, remember? I would’ve got breakfast if you didn’t live out in the middle of nowhere.”

Michael snorted. “Sanders’ is not in the middle of nowhere.”

“Anywhere I have to drive more than ten minutes to get a coffee is the middle of nowhere, Guerin. Hi.” He smiled as the waitress arrived at their table, eyes just as bright as before. 

“Hi.” She beamed back, notebook out. “You guys ready to order?”

Alex got a salad, Michael got spaghetti. And Michael squinted at the waitress as she walked away and said, “She’s shadowed.”

Alex frowned, resisting the urge to turn and look himself. If he hadn’t seen anything while she was standing in front of him, he wouldn’t see anything now. “How badly?”

“Not bad. I could hear it in her voice a bit.” Michael reached for his coffee and sipped it. “You were saying something about shades and machines. Don’t you licenced guys have all the fancy tech these days? EMP and EMF and special camera lenses and all that shit?”

Alex smiled slightly and lifted his wrist to show off his iron bracelet. “Have you seen me with anything more high-tech than this?”

“So, what?” Michael smirked. “They can’t afford to outfit you properly?”

“No.” Alex snorted. “No, I decided to go with an agency that doesn’t bother with that stuff. You can’t substitute technology for sensitivity.”

“Ooh, really toeing the company line,” Michael teased, and Alex shook his head, both annoyed and amused despite himself.

“Shut up. I happen to believe it.”

“Why?”

Alex leaned back in his seat and shrugged. “It’s about treating the cause over the symptoms. A machine or a camera with a Kitto lens might be able to tell you where a haunt is, and you can banish it from that specific location, but it’s gonna come back. Haunts almost always do. But if you’ve got a shade with actual sensitivity, they might be able to figure out what set it off in the first place, and give the client tips on keeping it dormant.”

“Gimme an example.” Michael looked like he was enjoying himself, leaning back in his seat too, and spreading his legs. Alex couldn’t help remembering the bar Michael had found him in in Las Cruces, and the way he’d flirted. They weren’t in a less public place here, but it was daylight, and he still felt shadowed. “What was the last job you did? Why couldn’t someone with some fancy ghost-hunting equipment have done it faster?”

“They could’ve.” Alex pushed the bracelet he’d shown Michael back under his sleeve. It wasn’t a fashionable piece of jewellery, but he was very aware of how it might look, all of a sudden. “My last job was just a revenant. Little thing, but it was blowing out the lights when it got going, and the clients weren’t exactly thrilled with that. Anyone can do a basic banishing, when it comes down to it. Figure out where the nexus is – which, yeah, you can do with an EMP detector a lot of the time – buy some banishing powder, say a chant of your choice. Works for basic spooks most of the time, or it’ll piss ‘em off.” Alex shrugged. “There’s a reason you get licensed for this stuff.”

“If you can,” Michael said, and Alex nodded.

“Sure. Anyway, you could do that, but my approach was to figure out where the nexus was and sit in it for a bit till the haunt manifested, which didn’t take long. I kept getting grief and hearing this song I didn’t recognise, but when I sang it – hummed it – back to the clients, they recognised it as something they’d been playing a lot lately.”

“What was it?”

“Uh.” Alex remembered after a second. “Something by Dido? _Here with Me_, I think.”

“Depressing. What were they listening to that for?”

“It’s in the title sequence of some TV show they were binging.” Alex shrugged. “For some reason, that was the thing setting this haunt off, so I did a little banish and told them to stop playing it. Recommended they mention it to their landlord too, but I don’t know if they’ll bother. Point is, you’re not gonna get any information like that from a machine. A banishment would’ve put it down for a bit, but they would’ve kept playing that song and the revenant would’ve come back again. Easier to just do it properly the first time.” Michael smiled at him, crooked and entirely too amused. Alex narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“You sound like me when I’m working at Sanders’. People keep their cars going as long as they can, try to fix ‘em themselves, then act shocked when their car breaks down again. And like, I get it when they’re broke and they straight-up can’t afford better, but some people just want to cut corners for no reason and eat into their wallet doing it. Makes no sense to me.”

“That your main job then?” Alex asked. “Car mechanic?”

“Yeah. I’m not into shadow work for the money.” Michael snorted. “I liked being a ranch hand well enough, apart from the early mornings, but I was still making a bit extra on the side then from fixing people’s shit.”

Alex wanted to say something about Michael being good with his hands. The line was on the tip of his tongue, but the chatter of everyone around them in the diner seemed so loud, the noise pressing in at him. He couldn’t find his voice, and it was a relief when their food came.

They got back to work afterwards, walking out from the centre a bit and taking advantage of the rain blowing over for the time being. Alex had to duck into another diner restroom to take one of his liner socks off, his stump expanding slightly from the heat and constant walking. He nearly cursed out loud when he finished washing his hands and looked up at the mirror to see a shadowy figure reflected behind him. Instead of swearing, he studied the figure, ignoring his racing heart. 

Lots of mirror apparitions – and apparitions, period – appeared distorted, with blurred features or wrongly-shaped limbs. This one looked unmistakably alien, with a too-large head and too-thin body. It didn’t have eyes, but Alex could tell it was looking at him. “I see you,” he told it, not turning around. Most mirror apparitions were only visible in reflective surfaces. “What do you want?”

It lifted its hand, wrist maybe an inch and a half thick at the most, and Alex saw with a jolt of disbelief that it only had three fingers before he realised what it was about to do and he lurched out of the way.

He didn’t see the alien’s hand connect with the glass, but he heard it, and that was shocking enough. When he looked up from where he’d stumbled into a sort of half-crouch and saw that the mirror had cracked, real fear jolted through his chest.

“Shit,” he breathed, alone in the restroom. He took a deep breath and wiped his wet hands on his jeans before walking out, still awkwardly crouched so his reflection wouldn’t appear in the mirrors above the sinks.

It wasn’t completely impossible for apparitions to manifest physically like that, but Alex had never heard of it happening to anyone he knew, and he’d certainly never experienced it himself. He didn’t notice how cold he was until he was outside in the heat again, and he met Michael’s raised eyebrow with a nod at the map. “Thought of anywhere?” He’d suggested seeing if any specific locations seemed particularly haunted in the town centre, hoping they could narrow their search area down a bit.

“Not really.” Michael rubbed his thumb along the now crumpled paper, frowning. “I thought…the library isn’t really in our circle here, but we used to…me and Max, we’d hang out there a lot. And at the Crashdown, like I said, but I don’t know. And I thought. Maybe.” He shrugged one shoulder, awkward and hunched. “Maybe the UFO Emporium. We never went there, but, y’know. Symbolism.”

Alex wanted to say that Michael had been there, at least once. Michael had –

“It’s not a bad idea,” he said, forcing his memories down. “We could walk past, take a closer look.”

“It’s not in the centre,” Michael pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter. We don’t know the rules of engagement yet, so we need to cover all the bases we can think of.”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “The rules of engagement?”

“Figure of speech. Come on.” Alex tilted his head in the direction of the emporium and started walking. “Crashdown’s on the way.”

“You wanna go in?” Michael sounded wary, and while Alex wasn’t sure why, he could relate.

“Not really. Arturo will recognise me, and I want to keep flying under the radar if I can.”

“We were out at the Pony yesterday,” Michael snorted. “I think that ship has sailed, shade.”

“Say that five times fast,” Alex retorted, and bit back a laugh when Michael immediately started muttering under his breath.

“Ship’s shailed, shade. Fuck. Ship’s sailed, shade. Ship’s ship, ship’s sailed, okay, ship’s sailed, sade, sip’s sailed, sade – fuck!”

“Oh my God, give it up.” Alex nudged him, snickering. 

“You do it!”

“Ship’s sailed, shade.” Alex said it slowly to get his lips around the shape of the word, then sped up. “Ship’s sailed shade, ship’s sailed shade, ship’s sailed shade, ship’s sailed shade. Ha.”

“Dick.” Michael was laughing though, so it didn’t sting. “Anyway, point is, you’ve already been out in public. You’re out in public right now.”

“With a map.” Alex tugged it out of Michael’s grip and held it up. “Tourists are invisible to locals, you know that.” He sped up, dodging around a family of genuine tourists in alien t-shirts, and Michael let the subject drop.

They got absolutely nothing useful from their continued traipsing around town, and had to head back to Michael’s truck before the meter ran out and the rain started again. It was humid, the air and the clouds hanging low in the sky promising more storms before the day was through. Michael didn’t protest when Alex suggested going back to Max and Isobel’s houses to give them a more thorough going-over. The only bit they paused over was Isobel and Noah’s bedroom, and Alex looked sideways at Michael. “I will totally understand if you don’t want to go through your sister’s underwear drawer.”

“I don’t want you going through it either,” Michael said, looking a little sickened.

“I’m not exactly jumping at the prospect, trust me.” Alex sighed and looked back at the unrealistically perfect bedroom. “But if we’re being extra sure, we can’t leave anything out. And the underwear drawer is one of the number one hiding places people use.”

“I know.” Michael made a face and turned away. “Okay. I’ll go through the office, you do the bedroom. And we’ll never speak of it again.”

“Hopefully I’ll find nothing and we can pretend it never happened when we find them,” Alex said, and smiled when his use of ‘when’ worked as he’d hoped, lifting a little of the tension in Michael’s shoulders.

He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or annoyed when his search of both Isobel and Noah’s separate underwear drawers turned up nothing. And that was drowned out by pure horror when he found a drawer full of sex toys. He didn’t think he’d ever closed a drawer so quickly in his life, and then he had to brace himself and open it again to take a longer look to make sure it was _only_ sex toys in there.

Thankfully, everything was laid out as neatly as the contents of every other drawer he’d checked so far, so he didn’t have to touch anything to see that there was nothing out of the ordinary in there, so to speak. More rope than he might have expected. Multiple sets of cuffs.

He closed the drawer again and vowed to himself to never breathe so much as a hint of what he’d just seen to anyone, living or dead. 

Michael appeared in the doorway while Alex was finishing up going through the cupboard under the sink in the ensuite. “Find anything?”

“No.” Alex eased himself from his knees onto his feet and straightened up slowly. He wasn’t used to quite so much walking in one day, and his stump was starting to ache a little. “I was thinking though, we should grab a set of clothes for each of them.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

“Well if they were abducted – and I’m not saying they have been, but if they have, they were only wearing one set of clothes when that happened. Might be good to have a spare set for them when we find them.”

Michael nodded, soothed again by Alex’s use of ‘when’ instead of ‘if’. “Okay. Yeah, that’s…we can do that.”

“You get something from their closets,” Alex said, sighing. “I’ll get underwear. And we’ll wrap it in whatever clothes you pick and pretend we didn’t see it.”

“Works for me.” Michael pretended to shudder and went to pick out clothes for them. Alex didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but there was still something in him that was surprised when Michael didn’t hesitate over his choices for either Isobel or Noah. For Isobel, he got a pair of soft-looking black jeans, a cream top, and a chunky black cardigan. For Noah, blue jeans, a worn button-down, and a pale blue sweater. “She hates this one,” Michael muttered as he folded it. “Isobel, I mean.”

“Is it hers?” Alex asked, picking up the black jeans to fold around the underwear he’d gotten out of Isobel’s drawer.

“No, it’s Noah’s. She thinks it’s ugly on him, but he likes it so much she’s never made him get rid of it.” Michael cleared his throat. “Everyone thinks she walks all over him, but she’d never make him do anything he didn’t want, y’know? They’re really cute together.”

“Did you get to say shit like that at their wedding?” Alex asked, hoping to lighten the mood.

“Yeah, actually.” It worked – Michael smiled at him, like he was sharing a secret. “It was pretty small, and I kinda stuck out – I don’t clean up easy.” Alex didn’t believe that for a second. “But yeah, I got to make a speech at the reception. Noah cried. It was pretty great.” His smile, now directed at the bed, turned into a grin.

Alex wanted to wrap his arms around him from behind and tuck his face against the back of Michael’s neck.

He breathed through the desire and came over to fold Noah’s jeans around his boxers and socks. “Shoes,” he said, hating the way Michael’s smile slipped away, replaced by a confused little frown. “They might need shoes, just in case.”

“Oh, yeah.” Michael’s expression cleared, and he went to grab a pair of boots from Isobel’s closet and loafers from Noah’s.

Alex couldn’t even imagine picking out clothes for any of his brothers. He had no idea what any of them might wear casually. He couldn’t picture any of them out of uniform, even though he’d definitely seen them in civvies. But Michael knew exactly what to pick for his sister and his brother in law, no hesitations or second-guesses. 

Alex swallowed and picked up the clothes. “Let’s go then.”

“To Max’s?”

“Yeah.”

Michael nodded, pair of shoes in each hand, and they went to ransack his brother’s house as well. Alex watched the rain come in as they drove out, his heart lightening as they crossed the boundary line. Sheets of water moved across the desert, casting it in greyscale, light shining through the cracks between the dark grey clouds. Somewhat predictably, Max’s place turned up nothing at all, but it was nice being outside Roswell. Alex took a moment in Max’s kitchen to just breathe, listening to the sound of Michael going through Max’s bedroom and enjoying the sound of the rain on Max’s many windows.

If he ever settled down anywhere, he thought suddenly, he wanted a place like this. Somewhere more then ten minutes’ drive from the nearest coffee place. Somewhere harder to find, with more privacy than a house on a suburban street could offer. He never wanted to live somewhere like his dad’s house ever again; an ugly house on an ugly street with neighbours who were only curious about the wrong things. He never wanted his behaviour observed by people he didn’t know and trust. He’d rather be like Max and Michael, living on the outskirts.

Michael came back in, expression pinched. “Nothing. Except a half-empty box of condoms I wish I could unsee.”

“At least he’s being safe?” Alex offered, and bit back a smile at Michael’s revulsion.

“Not something I ever want to think about.” He sighed and leaned against the wall. “I’m out of ideas, man. I don’t know what to do next.”

“Did you get a set of clothes for Max?”

Michael shook his head and went back into the bedroom. While he was in there, Alex walked out into the living room and stared out at the desert beyond Max’s glass-panelled doors. The clouds extended all the way to the horizon now, smudged in ridges like an upside-down ploughed field of grey clay. When he heard Michael behind him and saw the vague outline of him reflected in the doors, he said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we could try scrying.”

“Scrying?” Michael sounded about as sceptical as Alex had expected. “Did seeing Mimi this morning put ideas in your head?”

Alex turned around to look at him. “More the fact that you’ve said you’re actually telepathic, at least with Max and Isobel. It’s worth a shot, right?”

“You have fancy tech for that?” Michael asked, raising his eyebrows. He was holding a bundle of clothes under one arm and a pair of sneakers in his other hand. “Or do you do it the old-fashioned way? Crystal ball? Ink and water?”

“Try to suspend your disbelief, but I don’t have the budget for a crystal ball,” Alex said dryly. “I go for the cheap option.”

“Which is?”

“The Ganzfeld Technique.” He smirked. “Half a ping-pong ball over each eye and white noise on your headphones. The poor man’s sensory deprivation tank.”

“Wow. That sounds horrifying.” Despite that, Michael sounded intrigued. “Have you done it before?”

“A few times, yeah. It works pretty well.”

“Okay.” Michael heaved a sigh, gesturing as much as he could with both arms. “Sure, I’ll try anything at this point. You’ve got the ping-pong balls?”

“In my bag, yeah.” Back at Michael’s trailer. As they drove back to Roswell, Alex considered the motel room he’d rented. It wasn’t exactly bank-breaking, but if he was renting it, he should be using it. But checking out would mean asking Michael if he could keep staying with him, and that was… He wasn’t sure what that was. Unacceptable, maybe. Or something.

“What was it like when you did it?” Michael asked, interrupting his thoughts. “This scrying technique, whatever you called it.”

“The Ganzfeld Technique.”

Michael snorted. “Poor man’s sensory deprivation. This was something those drugged-up scientists made up in the seventies, wasn’t it? I can already tell.”

“I mean, they were onto something, even if they didn’t know what.” Alex shrugged. “Telepathy in human brains has never been proved, but it can enhance shadow sensitivity.”

“Fuck knows what it’ll do to me then,” Michael muttered.

“It’ll be fine. If it makes you more receptive to telepathic messaging from Max or Isobel –”

“Yeah.” Michael cleared his throat. “How’s it worked for you then? When you’ve done it?”

“I use it when I can’t figure out a haunt’s nexus or motivations.”

“Motivations?” Michael snorted. “Do you therapise them out of haunting people?”

“Hey, sometimes people want to find a way to live with their ghosts instead of banishing them, you know.”

“Fucked up.”

“Not really.” Alex looked out of the window, at the rain-drenched air and sky. “If you think about how haunts usually come back anyway, some people just figure it’s easier in the long-term if you figure out that your hallway’s cold spot will keep itself to itself if you acknowledge it. Sometimes that’s all they want, just someone to acknowledge them.”

“What the hell? This is what I never got, y’know?” Michael waved a hand at him without looking. “Like, they’re distortions in the atmosphere, or whatever. They’re not _sentient._”

“Except for when they are. Just because you can’t sense it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” It was a saying he used fairly often, but it worked better when his clients would feel the effects of a haunt once it passed a certain strength threshold. Even someone insisting nothing was shadowing them had to face facts when they had nightmares for a month straight, or when all the milk in their fridge curdled only an hour after getting it home. When their belongings went missing and their luck turned sour and mice started making nests in their walls, people had to admit that even if they couldn’t feel a cold spot or see an apparition, something might be wrong. Sometimes people called a shade out to confirm that they weren’t going crazy as much as to ward their house. But Michael didn’t feel shadowed no matter how strong the haunt, and never would. It was a strange thing to try to wrap his head around.

Michael sighed. “It just doesn’t make sense. Revenants and imprints and all that, I get. Pressing psychic energy into a location or an object, sure, whatever, but actual ghosts? Deceased human beings being _aware_ of new experiences post-mortem? It’s insane. This planet is insane.”

Alex’s smile grew slowly across his face. “It’s not so bad.”

“It’s stupid.”

“Pretty sure stupidity isn’t limited to the planet Earth.”

Michael snorted. “Well, Max exists, so that’s a proven fact. Anyway, I know what you use this Ganzfeld Technique _for_, but what’s it like?”

Alex hummed. “Weird. Takes a while to get into it, so you need to give it like, fifteen minutes to half an hour to let your brain sort of relax into the stimulation it’s getting. The idea is that you’re getting this passive sort of input from your eyes and ears, but it’s not actually doing anything. It’s just empty whiteness and white noise. So your brain eventually starts trying to create its own stimulation, and that’s when you open your mind to receiving more than you’re aware of. In theory.”

“Mmm.” Michael’s hand flexed on the steering wheel. “You wanna get anything before we go back? Food or whatever?”

“I’m good.” Alex braced himself when Michael murmured a warning about the boundary coming up, but it still washed over him like something physical, like stepping into a cold spot. 

“You okay?” Michael asked, glancing over, and Alex nodded on automatic, deeply hating how he was already fighting the urge to scan their surroundings to see if anyone was watching them. The beat-beat of the windscreen wipers suddenly sounded too loud, almost aggressive, and the rain seemed to threaten floods and disaster.

“I’m fine.”

When they got back, Michael didn’t protest or make any more complaints about the stupidity of Earth’s natural haunt activity as Alex directed him to lie down on his bed and put his headphones in, connected to Alex’s phone, which was playing a two hour-long white noise track. He put the halved ping-pong ball over his eyes, looking completely ridiculous, and lay still.

Alex watched him for a few seconds – just to make sure he seemed comfortable. The seconds stretched into a minute. A few minutes. The rain outside stopped, sudden as someone turning off a faucet. He kept meaning to reach for his laptop, like he’d told Michael he would, but there was something about watching Michael lie on his back and just breathe. He was captivated by the slow, steady rise and fall of Michael’s chest. By the exact shape of his curls on the pillow, the dip of the sheets around the weight of his body. 

He looked peaceful. The ping-pong balls over his eyes ruined the picture slightly, but not enough for Alex to tear his eyes away. He could look, and though he knew it was kind of wrong, he did it anyway. He stared and stared, tracing every inch of Michael’s body that he could see with his eyes. 

_Pervert._

Alex flinched, for a second not sure if it had been his own head or a haunt sneaking in. Just himself, he decided after a moment, and wasn’t sure if that was the better option or not. Either way it snapped him out of his creeping, and he lifted his laptop onto his knees. He was sitting on the tall chair opposite the bed, but the table was too short for him to crouch over it to type. 

He still kept looking at Michael, even though he’d angled himself to face forward instead of towards him to try and mitigate the temptation. He kept looking around at him, however much he tried to focus on his laptop. Usually he sank into work like water, a steady descent. That was what he needed to do, but he kept dipping in and out, constantly distracted by Michael’s presence, even though he wasn’t even doing anything.

He was reading a comment thread online when he heard movement against the sheets and snapped his head around so fast he was worried for a second that he’d clicked something in his neck. At first he couldn’t see if anything had happened, but then he heard the sound again and noticed that Michael’s hand was twitching, his good fingers and thumb digging into the sheets, bad fingers trembling. On a hunch, Alex arched his neck and caught a glimpse of Michael’s other hand, which was clenched into a tight fist.

He’d never really thought about the things Michael would be physically incapable of doing with his left hand damaged the way it was. Testing, he curled the fingers of his left hand, trying to make a fist with only his index and middle fingers. It wasn’t possible without his ring finger bending with them, and of course Michael’s ring finger didn’t seem to be able to bend at all.

It hurt when he overused it, he’d said last night. And his main jobs other than being a shade had been as a ranch hand and a mechanic – physical work that would require use of his hands. 

Alex didn’t understand how Michael couldn’t resent him for his injury. But that was another reason Michael had known Alex would come when he asked. He was too tactical to make it obvious, but he had to know how guilty Alex felt about what had happened and knew he could leverage that.

The guilt coiled in his stomach, but along with it was that strange relief he’d felt yesterday when he’d figured out that Michael was leveraging Alex’s feelings. Though that now seemed wrong, and it seemed more likely that Michael didn’t know about that at all.

Alex wrenched his gaze away from Michael, cursing internally. How the hell was he supposed to tell what was him and what was a haunt just pushing at his feelings to inflate them beyond what was actually there? In the boundaries of the town, he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.

On the bed, Michael hissed, and Alex whipped his head up to look, biting down on his lip to stop himself saying anything. There was no way of knowing what was normal for Michael in this sort of situation, so he didn’t know whether it was irrational or not to be so on edge. He watched, barely breathing, as Michael’s left hand trembled against the sheets, and he suddenly flinched so violently that the halved ping pong balls fell off his face.

“Michael!” Alex shoved the laptop onto the table without looking, falling onto his feet and reaching out. “Guerin.”

Michael yanked out the headphones and sat up, breathing fast. “Fuck, ow. Does it hurt when you do it?”

“No.” Alex sat back down, reigning himself in and hoping it wasn’t obvious how worried he’d been. How worried he was. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Michael grimaced and covered his face with his hands. “My head hurts though. I thought for a second there I was getting something, but then it was like…I don’t know, like a knife made out of a scream going right through my temple.”

Well that was evocative. “That’s not normal.”

“Go figure.” Michael sighed, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What if you tried?”

“I can try if you like,” Alex agreed at once, before he could even really think about it. “I don’t know how successful it would be though.”

“Worth a shot, right?”

“Yeah.”

Michael sighed again and swung his legs off the bed, reaching out and grabbing hold of the kitchen divider to help pull himself to his feet. As Alex watched, he got a bottle of nail polish remover from one of the overhead lockers and took a couple of sips. “All yours,” he said tiredly, moving out of the way and gesturing to the bed.

“Okay.” Alex moved to sit on it and unlaced his boots. It was strange, easing the boot off his prosthetic foot. He wore the same boots every day, and he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d taken it off his prosthesis. He usually took off the whole leg to sleep and then put it on again when he woke up. It wasn’t like he needed to change the sock on the prosthetic foot, after all. “You mind if I use your headphones?”

“Nah, go for it.”

They were cheap, white wire ending in hard white plastic buds, the old-fashioned kind that sat in the ear rather than going deeper into the canal, and they were absolutely not comfortable to wear. But Alex had asked now, so he put them in and lay down, picking up the ping pong ball halves and settling them carefully over his eyes. The white noise was steady and constant, and he could smell Michael on the pillow he was lying on.

The world was pale grey and empty, and Alex had to fight the urge to close his eyes. He blinked slowly instead and let his vision slip in and out of focus, the softness of the white noise filling his head. He breathed slowly and tried not to concentrate on anything. Tried to ignore his body and his busy thoughts. Tried to be as empty as the greyness in front of his eyes, as the steady shushing in his ears.

He felt something tickling on the edge of his mind and didn’t ignore it or pursue it. That was the trick, he’d learned – he just had to lie there and let it come closer on its own. Any other approach would make it vanish and he’d have to start again. So he floated, no longer feeling the irritations of his body, the little pinches and itches and the press of the socket of the prosthesis around his stump.

Like a mote of dust, that was all he was. Floating where the world nudged.

He had no sense of time, but he was practiced at not letting that bother him. He would see whatever came to him when it came – there was no point in worrying about it. In his previous attempts, he’d seen all sorts of strange things before the weird eddies of the visions gave him anything useful, and he wasn’t expecting anything different this time.

He thought he saw spots, maybe, or freckles. The gaps between them grew and shrank, and became a little like swiss cheese, like the huge piece of spaceship Michael had in his bunker. The holes expanded and shrank slowly, like they were breathing.

He thought he could maybe hear humming, like an engine, or throbbing, like an oil drill, a nodding donkey. The holes became bumps, greyscale desert that became less greyscale and more at the same time. The desert, the rough, hard earth, the scrub and sage and deceptive emptiness. Red-orange-brown. 

Alex breathed, and between one slow blink and the next the desert went back to the spaceship part, but made of earth this time. The holes were caves, pits. Hiding places. They shrank and expanded like they were breathing, and Alex breathed with them. Desert plants unfolded along them, long, thin leaves making lines like soft cracks, like rivers, like the arroyos that ran down from the mountains to the plains.

His home. The earth in his bones, in his skin. Arroyos flooding periodically like blood through veins, like the saliva in his mouth. The holes in the desert-spaceship expanded and shrank and expanded and blinked closed and opened again like flowers opening and closing as the planet turned towards and away from the sun. His sun, his home, his desert, his body.

He heard Mimi whisper about other worlds.

His surprise at hearing something – he’d never heard anything when scrying before – broke the lazy unfocused vision for a moment, and the greyness came back. Alex breathed through the spike of annoyance and let his mind drift back into the vague state from before. A dust mote in the sun.

The greyness coalesced into the spaceship-desert again and slowly replayed as before. It was like watching a dance, an odd dance that wasn’t quite natural, because now he had Mimi’s strange warning at the edge of his mind. The desert blinked at him, and he realised it was watching him. It was alive. 

It wasn’t surprising, in this state. Of course it was alive – how could it not be? It watched him with a thousand thousand eyes and showed him the shapes of it, the way it moulded and was moulded by the water that flowed beneath its skin and rushed through its surface, how it changed and was changed by the creatures that crawled upon it and within it and flew overhead and dipped down to rest on it, eat from it, die on it. Feathers became leaves became feathers became clouds, endless and eternal. The sky was so big that Alex fell into it. Gravity reversed and his breathing caught, but the clouds moved like the earth had and showed him how to breathe again. The clouds glowed, and so did the sky in the gaps between them, and Alex breathed through instinctive fear at the sheer size of it all.

He was a dust mote in the sun, and that was fine. Everything was bigger than him.

Mimi whispered in his ear again, but he wasn’t distracted this time. He heard her whisper about other worlds and thought that maybe she said something about the palms of his hands. Creases and ridges like hills and arroyos and mountains and valleys. He saw the lines of a palm against the sky, the lines behind the fabric of the world. Behind the creases in the skin were other lines, like contour lines on a map, the whorls of fingerprints, the shape of the universe.

They moved like the desert had, breathing. Expanding and shrinking, a lovely dance, lines all around him that he fell through. Three-dimensional ripples that described the way everything moved in the world. He felt like he understood it here and there as he watched it for an indescribable length of time, mesmerised by it. 

The humming in his ears was like a sort of music, and he heard something change in it before something shifted in the lines he was watching. They shrank around holes, like the holes in the spaceship, in the desert, pores in his skin, shrinking further to protect and hold as the holes – objects? – moved through the dance. Not quite part of it, but not breaking it either. It was cool, there was no other way to describe it.

It faded into flowers, unfolding leaves and geometric shapes, and then back into those rippling lines.

Something hummed in his throat and he realised he was trying to hum along with the rhythm in his ears. He couldn’t tell whether he was managing it, but he tried for a while anyway, though it wasn’t quite perfect when he had to keep breathing. The lines reminded him of guitar strings, and he wondered how he could replicate the music with his fingers instead of his voice. It wouldn’t be perfect either, but it might be better. 

The lines shifted, and he thought they became bars on a cell, a fence, the lines of roads, of man-made rivers, of telephone wires. All of that and more. Wooden rafters in a shed. Waves beating on a sandy shore. Lines of data on a computer screen. Legs of birds. Bristles of a paintbrush, itself painting more lines, more lines, more lines.

He couldn’t get out of them. He breathed and didn’t panic, focused a little on the quiet shhhhh of the white noise and let himself continue to float.

He would never get out. The certainty grew in him slowly, like a container filling with liquid. The lines were syringe needles, stitches, bars of cells, mortar between bricks. He was never getting out.

The lines became circles again, slowly blinking desert eyes that let out an inaudible scream when a line sliced through them. An object torn from its safe containment of other lines. Impact, a crash landing. Desert eyes opened, were holes, were the spaceship, were mutating, were dangerous.

Ghosts in the desert. Distortions in the lines. Static in his ears.

The humming was all messed up, the lines were all bent, and it was – 

His heart was hurting; it was beating too fast, and before he could stop himself Alex moved his arm to grab at his shirt over his chest, trying to calm it down. The movement of his physical body should have broken the vision, but instead it lurched into HD and the hum became a shriek and he suddenly felt so much, all at once. He was paralysed by it for a second, choking on it, his whole body seizing under the onslaught of guilt and shame and raw terror.

He made a sound, he could feel it in his throat, but he couldn’t move. He was trapped, stuck, the bars were lines were ropes were chains were wires wrapped tight around him and he was never moving again, they were under his skin, right against his bones –

Warmth on his arm, and a sudden pulse through his whole body like a shockwave. Alex could move again, and he rolled onto his side and clawed the headphones out of his ears, sucking in deep breaths so hard it hurt.

Michael let go of his arm, but Alex reached out to try and catch him, a headphone wire still caught between his pinkie and ring finger. He remembered himself mid-movement, but Michael had already knelt and grabbed his hand. “You okay?” he asked, alarmed.

“Yeah.” Alex squeezed his eyes shut, anchoring himself in the reassuring darkness for a moment. “Shit.”

“Not normal for you either?”

“Definitely not.” Alex tried to make himself let go of Michael’s hand but only succeeded in loosening his grip for a moment before holding on tighter. “Shit, okay. Lines, lots of lines. Where’s my phone, I need to write this down, or…”

“Here.” Michael pressed it into his other hand and Alex sat up, crossing his legs on the bed and finally letting go of Michael’s hand.

“Thanks. Okay.” Voice memo would be easier, he decided, and closed his eyes as he started speaking. “Desert ship, holes with eyes, lots of geometric shapes – the usual. Earth in the bones. Lines everywhere, like…like lines on a map, contour lines.” Deep breath. “Flowers and leaves and feathers. Definitely locational, really strongly tied to the land here. I think…not sure if I recognised any of it by sight, but I really felt like I did, like ancestral memory.” It felt strangely embarrassing to say things like this in front of Michael, but Alex couldn’t afford to censor himself and possibly forget things when they weren’t as fresh in his mind. “Earth to sky, same visual effects with the clouds as the ground. Lines behind the universe, like…like seeing particles in the air. It started with dots that became holes, or gaps. Natural gaps, like…something that appears in nature, like Guerin’s spaceship, like swiss cheese. Natural land formations, they kept becoming each other. Gaps kept getting big and small, like they were breathing, but not in a creepy way.” What else?

“You saw all this?” Michael sounded freaked out, and Alex waved his hand without opening his eyes.

“Shut up, I’m still trying to remember everything before it went to shit. Fuck, breathing…it was…the lines were important, I can’t remember how.” He sighed and opened his eyes. “Damn. Okay. Well, then they kind of turned into chains or something and I couldn’t move, and the haunt hit me like a ton of bricks. Usual emotional attack, Roswell flavour.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Michael asked.

Alex hesitated, not sure if he wanted to record it. He turned the recorder off and lowered his phone to his lap. “The watched feeling, amped up to a hundred.”

“That’s an emotional attack?”

“What does it feel like when you know someone’s watching you?” Alex asked bluntly. “Or when you feel like someone might be?”

“Twitchy, I guess.”

“Self-conscious?” 

“Yeah?”

“Self-consciousness ramped up turns into other things.” Alex wanted to tell him and didn’t want to either. “If you feel like you’re being watched all the time but there’s nothing you can do about it, like you’re a bug under a microscope –”

“Trapped.” Michael tilted his head. “Like you’re trapped?”

“Yeah.” Among other things. Feeling trapped wasn’t Alex’s first reaction to the watched feeling the town-wide haunt was giving him, but it seemed significant that it was Michael’s. Alex’s reaction was shame, that utter mortification that came with being caught doing something he shouldn’t have been doing but couldn’t help. The trapped feeling had followed, and the physical immobilisation had been part of it.

It meant something; he was sure of it. It was like his and Michael’s reactions had tangled together at the end of the scrying session, but that was –

“Is it possible for you to communicate telepathically with humans?” Alex asked, suddenly unsure.

Michael shook his head. “We’ve never done it. Other than what Isobel does with her power, but that’s not really communication like talking to someone. It’s not like they’re aware of it, y’know?”

“Have you ever tried?”

“I haven’t. I don’t know about Max and Isobel.” Michael raised an eyebrow. “I could think really loudly at you if you want.”

“No, it’s okay.” Alex breathed out, a little eased by Michael’s amusement, obvious under his still-present worry. “I guess it’s the same problem as before – there’s just too much activity. And scrying never gives clear results anyway, no matter what technique you use.”

“Yeah, I like that your preferred method is like, the most sciencey you could make it.” Michael smirked and got up to sit on the tall chair. “I Googled it while you were trying it. I knew it was a seventies thing. Very _Stranger Things_ of you.”

“I haven’t watched it.”

“Me neither.” Michael’s smile softened a little. “I read the synopses online because Isobel kept bugging me about it. So you actually saw stuff?”

“Yeah. That’s kind of the point of it, to give your brain a nudge into producing visions. You didn’t see anything at all?”

Michael shook his head. “I thought the white noise had a sort of rhythm to it for a second, and then it started getting sorta uncomfortable to listen to. Sorta screechy, like nails on a chalkboard or something. And then it jumped up about a hundred decibels and I sat up.”

“You said you thought you were getting something before that, didn’t you?”

Michael nodded slowly. “Kinda. Like I could maybe hear something behind the static.”

“Did it sound like the haunts you hear as distortions?”

“A little. But like…it’s the difference between watching a video of a live band and being there yourself, hearing the bass in your chest. Do you think any of the stuff you saw is useful?”

“I don’t know.” Alex sighed. “Scrying is the most annoying thing I ever resort to. You need so many contextual clues to figure out the significance of what you see, and then when you figure it out, it’s usually because you’re looking back at it and seeing where it slotted into what you had to do. There’s a reason people go to professionals for this stuff.”

Michael threw his hands up, rocking backwards in his chair. “So it was a waste of time?”

“Hey, it’ll probably make total sense _after_ we find them,” Alex said dryly. He looked down at his phone and replayed the voice memo. “The way your spaceship kept popping into my mind seems important, for some reason,” he muttered. “Your spaceship and the desert.”

“The crash site?”

“I don’t think so. There’s always loads of symbolism in scrying, it’s like trying to interpret dreams.”

“Did you see any of the same stuff in the nightmares you’ve been having?” Michael asked.

Alex shook his head slowly. “Other than the inclusion of alien stuff, I don’t think so. All the nature stuff…that’s so location-based.”

“But you don’t think it’s the crash site?”

“No, I think…I don’t know, something about the relationship between Earth and the alien. Either all part of the same universe, all the lines joining up, or the crash – shit, there was a crash, hang on.” He started to record again. “There were objects in the lines, and the lines held them without touching them. Kind of suspending them, like space moving around something heavy. Gravitational pull, or something. And the crash was one of these objects moving too fast and pushing through some of the lines? Maybe breaking them, I can’t remember, but there was definitely an impact.” He paused, and stopped recording again. “You forget everything really quick too,” he muttered. “Just like dreams. Have you been having any significant dreams?” he asked, not expecting much. Michael would have said if he had, and predictably, he shook his head.

“I don’t usually remember mine anyway. Fuck.” He leaned back and sighed explosively. “What now?”

“Research.” Alex nodded at their laptops. “See if we can dig anything up. We could try more scrying methods if you want.”

“Nah. Well. Maybe if we get really desperate.” Michael looked at the armchair, where he’d piled the clothes they’d taken from Max and Isobel’s houses. “Not that I’m not already desperate.”

“We’ll find them,” Alex said firmly.

“You think it’s time to start looking into your dad yet?” Michael asked, casting him a narrow-eyed, sideways look.

“No.” Alex answered instinctively. “Not yet,” he amended when Michael raised his eyebrows. “I want to see if we find anything that points towards a definite military presence.”

“There’s already a definite military presence in Roswell,” Michael said irritably. “There always has been.”

“We need to be sure.” Alex wanted to escape, but the idea of leaving the relative shelter of the Airstream kept him frozen on the bed. “We can’t…we can’t approach any military personnel with this, especially not my dad, unless we’re a hundred percent sure. It’s too dangerous.”

“Even if they have nothing to do with it?”

“Even then.” Michael turned away, but didn’t argue the point, to Alex’s relief. He checked his watch and reached for his boots. “We should get food, then settle in.”

He couldn’t read the look Michael gave him, but he nodded. “Alright. You get food, I’ll carry on like this morning?”

“Sure.” Alex caught Michael’s keys when he threw them and tried not to think that Michael was punishing him. He could go into Roswell for food alone, he wasn’t a child who needed babysitting. “What d’you want?”

“Anything, I don’t care.”

“Steamed vegetables it is,” Alex said dryly, hoping for a response. Michael just snorted, and Alex turned away in sudden embarrassment. Michael’s family was missing, and he was cracking jokes?

But they’d both cracked jokes before this.

He couldn’t tell whether he was being haunted or if he was just being neurotic, and getting outside didn’t help at all. The half-clear sky seemed to throb overhead, dusk still hours away, and Alex kept his eyes down as he hurried over to Michael’s truck and climbed in as fast as he could. 

Driving into town was honestly kind of nightmarish. He was actually getting used to the too-dark shadows and apparitions and the increasingly heavy smell of smoke, but the scrying had cracked open a gap in his defences, and he had to sit in the parking lot by the side of the first place he’d seen – a Thai restaurant that did takeout, according to the neon sign in their window – and just count his breaths for a few minutes before he could get out.

Alex wasn’t overconfident, but he knew he was good at his job, and he hadn’t been promoted to captaincy in the Air Force by mistake. So it was strange, feeling this self-conscious and twitchy, like everything he was doing was wrong. Even though all he was doing was picking up some food – it was hardly hacking foreign intelligence. 

“Get a grip,” he muttered to himself, and got out of the truck.

The bored-looking young woman behind the counter took his order and gestured for him to sit and wait, which he did. They’d only just opened, by the look of it. That, or it was depressingly empty for a Friday evening.

Alex watched as a dead deer, its fur peeling off flesh and bone in ragged strips, eye sockets empty and jaw partially exposed, walked slowly down the road. Whenever a car drove through it, its fur tore off a little more, and the car wavered slightly on the road. Roadkill’s revenge, Alex thought, and wondered how long it would take for the haunt to cause an accident. 

Did Max have a work laptop, he wondered. Or was he sloppy enough to use one laptop for everything?

Thinking about that was a good distraction from the inexplicable shame churning in the pit of his stomach, and he took the bag of takeout with a quiet thank you and kept his eyes down as he walked quickly from the restaurant to the truck, where he called Michael.

“You okay?” Michael asked before a single ring had completed.

“I’m fine,” Alex lied. “Just thinking – crime rates. Do you have a police radio?”

“Of course.”

Of course he did. Alex felt a burst of fondness, and then a wave of self-loathing so strong it almost made him heave. “Cool,” he managed. “Good, okay. If we got Max’s work laptop, do you think we could get into whatever database the Sheriff’s Department uses to keep track of local crime?” If not, they could make use of that radio.

“Easy. Did you get food already?”

“Yeah, I’m about to come back. Listen, we should eat while this is hot, but then –” 

“Yeah.” Michael sounded eager. “I know that building like the back of my hand, I can steal that laptop no problem.”

Alex grimaced. “Right. I’ll be back in a minute then.”

“Cool.” Michael hung up, and Alex started to drive. Jumping straight to stealing wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, but he didn’t see any other way they would be able to get it. He was banking on the weird amnesia around Max protecting them from any adverse effects, but they would just have to see.

Michael already had a plan when Alex got back, practically running from the truck to the trailer with his shoulders hunched like the sky was about to fall on him. “We’ll go in together,” he said. “If Cam’s still there, great, if not, it’s Friday night so it’ll be Thompson and Watkins.”

“How do you know the police rota?” Alex asked.

“The department’s like, this big.” Michael lifted his hand and showed a gap of less than an inch between his thumb and index finger. “And my usual arrest days are Friday and Saturday nights.”

“How many times have you been arrested?” Alex asked, not sure if he should be amused or concerned.

Michael shrugged and ate a mouthful of fried rice. “Enough to know who’s picking me up on any given night. Anyway, I’ve turned the cameras off in there a bunch of times, so that’s no problem. If we can get into their office, which, again, should be easy, I can just lift the laptop into one of our bags with my mind. Job done.”

“How many people are in this office?”

“Just two, Cam and Max.”

“So if she’s not there, how’re we going to get in there?”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “They’ll let me in. They know Max and I are…well, they don’t know we’re brothers, but they know we’re something. I’ve been in there plenty of times. They put me in the holding cell in there as a joke a few times, just to piss Max off.” He grinned, like that wasn’t one of the saddest things Alex had ever heard. “Getting in will be easy, trust me.”

“And you don’t think they’ll notice the missing laptop?”

“I guess we’ll find out.” Michael shrugged. “But I don’t think so, honestly, if their brains are still being messed with by this haunt. I’ll take the fall if something goes wrong, don’t worry.”

“No big deal,” Alex said sarcastically. “Not like you’re essential for this whole operation or anything and there’s no way I’ll be able to find your family without you.”

“Look, worst case scenario, they catch me with the laptop and I say it was a prank.” Michael shrugged. “They arrest me. You bail me out; I’ll pay you back later. We carry on. I already have a record for drunk and disorderlies as long as my arm – might as well spice it up with a little thievery.”

Michael’s total lack of concern was useful, there was no denying that, but it was still sad. 

Michael narrowed his eyes and pointed his fork at Alex. “If you say a single word about how I could’ve done better with my life, I’m stealing your noodles.”

Alex rolled his eyes and pushed the noodles between them. “If you want some, we can just share.”

“That’s, that’s not the point I was making.”

“I know.” Alex stuck his own fork into the box and scooped up a mouthful, and didn’t say a word about how Michael deserved so much better than an arrest record as long as his arm.

For a half-baked plan that never would have worked under normal circumstances, stealing Max’s laptop went just as smoothly as Michael had predicted. Cam – Jenna Cameron – had been on duty, and Alex distracted her with questions about Max that went in creepy circles while behind her back Max’s laptop disconnected itself and floated down to the floor where Michael had dumped his bag. They were in and out in less than fifteen minutes, and it didn’t take more than that back at the Airstream to break into the laptop and into the Chaves County police database.

The database was ancient and clunky and ugly in the extreme, and Michael watched over Alex’s shoulder as he figured out how to navigate it, both of them sitting on the bed. The results weren’t exactly unsurprising, but they were unpleasant.

“This is since Friday?” Michael muttered, frowning. “These are…is that one a murder?”

“Homicide,” Alex corrected, scrolling down. “You should be able to sort by category.”

“There.” Michael pointed at the screen. “That drop-down arrow.”

“No, that’s for the date.”

“The one next to it isn’t.”

“Oh. Okay, thanks.” Alex frowned at the menu. “This is going to take a while. Ah, hang on.” He spotted the Excel icon in the top right corner. “Thank fuck for that.”

“You love a spreadsheet?” Michael said, amused.

“Look, I’m not saying that it’s totally worth living with Microsoft’s frustratingly slow development and clunky updates and poor security just for Excel, but Excel does the job it needs to do better than anything else on the market.” Alex said, waiting for the report to download. 

Michael laughed. “Sure, you don’t have any opinions at all.”

Alex just shrugged, maybe pretending to be prim a little, and bit back a proper smile when Michael laughed again.

It took a while to work through the data, even with filters and putting in extra categories and removing bits they didn’t need. But the overall picture it painted was bleak. Violent crime had spiked on Friday 20th, and the trend had continued since. There had been ten disappearances, twenty-eight assaults, and twelve deaths. At least two were being treated as murder cases. 

“These are just the reported incidences,” Michael said, voicing Alex’s thoughts. “We don’t know how much people aren’t even noticing.”

“It gets better,” Alex muttered. “Destruction of property is up, so are call outs for public and private disturbances. People are getting in more fights, more homes are being broken into, there’s been an increase in vehicle accidents, an increase in neighbour disputes, and I would bet you good money that the number of pet disappearances and mutilations has jumped too.”

“Mutilations?” Michael recoiled, and Alex nodded.

“Pets are often the first casualty of a really brutal haunt. It’s the final straw for a lot of people – they can pretend to ignore a lot of stuff, but there’s no ignoring it if your cat’s head is left on your doorstep and its body is hung up by its tail over your back gate.”

“Is that common?”

“No.” Alex looked at the spreadsheet. “That’s really rare. I’ve never even dealt with a case involving a dead pet, I’ve only ever read about them or heard about them from other shades.”

“Shit.”

“Same with this sort of stuff.” Alex gestured to the screen. “It takes a tremendously strong influence to push people like this. Like that guy in the Pony on Wednesday. That was a really strong haunt riding him, and even then, I don’t know if it would have pushed him to murder.”

“I bet it would.” Michael massaged his left hand, brow furrowed. “Haunts target people who’re already susceptible for one reason or another. Easier to ride someone who’s already violent, right? Easier to push someone to kill their wife if they already beat her.”

It was horrible, but Alex nodded. “Pretty much.”

“Shit. Is this useful?”

“I thought it might be for the locational aspect, but even if you map them up –” Alex showed Michael the Google Map he’d peppered with pins showing the locations of the crimes. “They’re more concentrated the closer to the town centre they get, but not actually by that much. Less than I thought.”

“Back to square one,” Michael said quietly.

“Everything is a puzzle piece,” Alex told him. “Think of it like that. Nothing that tells us more about what’s going on is a waste of time.”

“What’s the hardest job you’ve ever done, as a shade?” Michael asked, leaning forward so his elbows were on his knees, hands lightly clasped. Alex looked at the inviting slope of his back and swallowed.

“Apart from this one?”

“Is this the hardest?” Michael looked at him, curls everywhere. Alex nodded.

“Never done a job with this much activity before.” Not to mention the horror that was being back in Roswell. Whatever the opposite of nostalgia was, that was what he had. Trauma, maybe. “I guess…hard in terms of the strength of the haunt, or hard as in how much effort I had to put in?”

“Effort.”

Alex thought about it for a moment. “Probably…last year, just after Christmas, I did a job outside Tucson. The haunt was a bit weird, there was a ghost and a blood-related curse thing going on, but it was more the land disputes that were just…so complicated. There were four families involved by the end, because one guy two generations back was a rapist and an adulterer, and it was spread between Tucson, a place called Three Points, Tucson Mountain Park, and the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. And there were white people and Indians involved on both sides, and two bodies that had been buried in unmarked graves. It was a mess; I was working on that for almost a month.”

“A month?” Michael’s face fell, and Alex nudged him. 

“There were dozens of people involved by the end of that, Guerin. This is just you and your family. And I was working alone for that, and we’re working this one together. We’re already covering more ground than either of us would be able to alone.”

Michael nodded jerkily. “So. Now we just…look at more alien conspiracy theories online?”

“Focus on the military angle. See if there’s anything legit floating around in there.”

Michael nodded again and reached out a hand. His laptop rose off the table and he caught it once it was within grabbing distance. “You want yours?”

“I’ve got it.” Alex leaned forward on his good leg and picked it up, putting Max’s aside on the bed. 

They worked quietly for a while. Michael had already proven that morning that he knew what he was doing when it came to sorting through bullshit, and it was refreshing to work next to someone Alex didn’t want to take the laptop away from. He knew Michael could do the job as well as him in this area, or at least that he didn’t need Alex hovering over his shoulder. He wouldn’t miss anything. He could be relied on.

He was focused too. Alex figured he’d have to be, to be teaching himself advanced physics in his free time, but it was another thing he appreciated, and appreciated being allowed to see, even if Michael didn’t have much choice in the matter. He wanted Alex’s help, so Alex had to be allowed close.

It got dark after a while, and Michael turned the lights on without getting up. Alex’s back was starting to ache from sitting on the bed without anything to lean against, but he wasn’t going to be the first to move.

“Hey,” Michael murmured. “You know what’s great about living out in the middle of nowhere?”

“No one can hear you scream?” Alex replied absently, scrolling through a page of documents someone had uploaded, swearing they’d been stolen from an Air Force database in the seventies. When Michael didn’t say anything, Alex cast a sideways look at him and snorted in realisation. “You were actually gonna say that, weren’t you?”

“I was gonna go for a less creepy approach,” Michael said. “But yeah, pretty much.” He leaned in, and when Alex tipped his head in invitation, Michael grinned and pressed a kiss to Alex’s jaw.

He’d been expecting a proper kiss, but his eyes fell closed all the same at the feeling of Michael’s mouth on his skin, warm and a little wet. Heat was radiating from Michael’s body, leaning close enough to press against Alex’s arm, and heat pooled in the pit of his stomach when Michael moved and kissed his neck, lower down, in a spot Alex hadn’t known could be so sensitive till Michael’s tongue pressed against it. His breath caught, and Michael hummed, pressing closer and kissing his neck again, closer to the join of his shoulder.

Alex held onto his laptop with one hand and brought the other up to slide into Michael’s hair. He liked this, Alex knew now. When he dragged Michael’s head up, he could see the way his eyelids fluttered, his lips parted. He twisted his laptop off his knees and grabbed Michael’s too, putting it carefully on the floor without letting go of Michael’s hair. Michael let him. Michael’s eyes fell closed and his tongue slid out to lick his lips like he wanted whatever Alex did.

Alex pushed him back until he was lying half on the bed, and held him down with his hand in Michael’s hair as he leaned over him to brush his lips against Michael’s jaw. He felt Michael’s chest jump, and part of him remembered very distantly that Michael was playing him. Michael knew what Alex wanted and was using him.

But it wasn’t like Michael was getting nothing out of it. Alex dragged his other hand down Michael’s chest, one finger bumping over a hard nipple, and turned his hand around to slide down Michael’s thigh to his knee. When he pushed it, opening Michael’s legs, Michael let out a shaky breath, and the heat in Alex’s stomach pulsed in response. The fabric of Michael’s jeans was rough against his palm, but Alex kept his touch light anyway as he pulled his hand up the inside of Michael’s thigh, and pushed it down again. Up, this time a little harder, dragging his nails a bit, and Michael’s hips twitched upwards. When Alex moved his hand a little higher, he felt the hard line of Michael’s cock and smiled against his chin.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did Michael. He wanted to see how far Michael would let him take it, if he teased. If he drew shapes on the inside of his thigh with his fingernails and only now and then let his thumb brush against Michael’s balls. Michael arched his back and pressed his head back into Alex’s hand. When he tried to turn his head and Alex held his hair tighter to keep him still, he groaned.

He was easily the hottest thing Alex had ever seen. He wanted to spread Michael out on a full-sized bed and tie him up with silk. He wanted to tangle his hands in those curls and tug until Michael begged. He wanted to kiss every inch of him, give him everything until he was shuddering and soft and loose. He wanted to see Michael drunk on pleasure, strung-out and shameless.

But he already had one of those things, at least. Michael was already shameless, starting to twist on the bed to get Alex to touch him harder, grabbing at Alex’s shirt and jacket with his hands, sliding them underneath to burn against Alex’s skin, pulling him closer. “C’mon,” he breathed finally, eyes closed. “Alex, come on.”

“What do you want?” Alex kissed him, the quickest press of lips to lips with barely any pressure. Michael strained for a second against the hand in his hair to try and chase him.

“Ahh…whatever you do,” he murmured, and Alex wished he’d said anything else. He ought to stop, to tell Michael they didn’t have to do this, he didn’t have to give himself like this, but Michael shifted on the bed and grabbed at Alex’s back, fingers digging in. “Come on, Alex,” he said again, eyes opening a little to fix Alex with a hazy look. “Anything, something.”

“Like…” Alex pressed his hand against Michael’s cock again, and Michael groaned, thrusting up against it.

“Yeah, fuck.”

Alex rubbed his hand along Michael’s erection, stroking him over his jeans, and scratched his nails against Michael’s scalp gently before pulling his head back. He kept the pressure easy, so Michael could have easily resisted, but Michael tipped his head back without protest, exposing his throat for Alex to kiss and bite. His stubble was rough against Alex’s lips and he loved it, loved the sharp shape of Michael’s adam’s apple and the way he could almost feel the rush of air on Michael’s every breath.

With his other hand he gave Michael’s dick one last hard press before unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his jeans. Michael thrust up and made a low, greedy sound that Alex hummed to hear, smiling against the column of Michael’s neck and kissing the skin there softly. He pushed and pulled Michael’s fly open and slid his hand in, pressing and rubbing again at his cock over the thin material of his underwear. He pressed a finger to the tip and felt the dampness there, and when he did Michael’s hips jerked right up off the bed.

“Fuck,” he gasped. “Uhh, fuck, Alex –”

“I’ve got you,” Alex murmured without thinking, and didn’t have to second-guess it when Michael rolled his whole body, fingernails on Alex’s back digging in. Every part of him felt alive and sparkling, a sort of sharp concentration clearing his mind of everything but Michael. He stroked him again and again, a slow rub that had Michael rolling his body up again and again, pushing with one foot against the ground.

Alex pulled the waistband of his briefs down as much as he could and brought his hand up to his own face to spit into his palm before reaching down and wrapping his hand around Michael properly. Michael groaned at the first stroke, and Alex rubbed his thumb over the tip of his cock, feeling how wet he was there. “Gotcha,” he whispered nonsensically, and Michael groaned again, mouth open and wanting.

His hands on Alex’s back were burning hot, fingernails digging in whenever Alex rubbed his thumb through the precum welling up from his cock. “Fuck,” he managed to breathe, low and wrecked. “Alex…”

“Yeah.” Alex pressed his nose to the line of Michael’s neck and scraped his teeth against the thin skin there. “Yeah.”

“God.” Michael pulled against the hand Alex had in his hair, twisting sideways and swallowing. “Fuck, oh my God.”

“Tell me.” Alex nipped at the skin below his ear and Michael shivered, cock so hard in Alex’s hand it was like a miracle. “What do you want?”

Michael made a quiet, desperate sound, then pushed out a word with what seemed like a huge amount of effort. “Faster.”

Alex sped up at once, and Michael moaned. He gasped when Alex licked his jaw, suddenly needing to know how Michael’s stubble would feel against his tongue. It was fucking incredible, unsurprisingly, and he pushed his nose against the wet stripe for a second before adjusting his hold on Michael’s hair and pulling his head down so Alex could kiss him, hard.

Michael made a high, helpless sound into it, his hands shaking against Alex’s back, his good hand clenching and unclenching like he was trying desperately to hold on. He kissed back just as hard, and Alex stroked him harder, trying to spread his precum down the shaft to make it slicker, a smoother drag. Michael’s chest heaved and his mouth went slack as he got close to the edge, and Alex didn’t let up, kept pushing him closer and closer, kept their mouths pressed together and swiped his tongue along Michael’s lip. 

Michael panted, voice cracking, and came with a quiet gasp that went right to Alex’s cock. And suddenly that was all he could think of. He stroked Michael until he was done, then wiped his hand on his shirt and reached down to undo his own belt and fly, wrapping his damp hand around himself and urging Michael into another kiss.

“Mmm. Mmm?” Michael slid his good hand down to the curve of Alex’s hip, and Alex kissed him deeper.

“Mm-mm.” He was fine like this; he was so close already. He just needed Michael to keep kissing him, to keep holding onto him. And Michael slid his hand back up and wrapped his arms around Alex tighter than before, gasping in the sloppy gaps between their kisses. His stubble was a constant burn against Alex’s lips and it was so good, he was so hot underneath him, so perfect –

Alex came with his mouth open against Michael’s, eyes screwed shut and breath jumping in his chest, and the pleasure rolled through him in waves, intense and wonderful. Made even more wonderful when Michael kissed him again, and kept kissing him when Alex kissed back. His hand was disgusting, but he didn’t care. Michael’s mouth was hot under his, his hair soft against Alex’s fingers, and his arms were heavy and sure where they were wrapped around Alex’s middle.

They kissed until Michael’s left hand drifted too lightly down Alex’s side and he flinched. “Ticklish,” he muttered in response to Michael’s raised eyebrows. 

“Kay.” And Michael moved his hand firmer up the dip of Alex’s spine, away from the ticklish spot, and Alex sighed against his chin in quiet relief. “Didn’t even get our clothes off,” Michael muttered, lips quirked, and Alex snorted. He pushed himself back a little and grimaced at his hand.

“I’ll get the cloth this time,” he offered, and Michael grinned.

“Such a gentleman.”

“That’s me,” Alex pushed himself to his feet, wobbling for a second before he steadied himself on Michael’s closet. He washed his hands before soaking and wringing out the same washcloth Michael had used last night, and then stood there looking at it for a second before saying, “Actually, could we shower?”

“You don’t have to ask my permission,” Michael laughed, and Alex rolled his eyes before leaning back out of the bathroom to raise an eyebrow at him. 

“Okay, but I have no idea how much water you have, so I thought I’d check.”

“Oh yeah. Hang on.” Michael levered himself to his feet, tucking his dick away with a nonchalance Alex couldn’t imagine possessing, and went to the front of the trailer to check a panel next to the door. “Water’s good, so long as you don’t go crazy with it.”

“You go first,” Alex said, glancing at Michael’s shirt, which had suffered having both of them come on it.

Michael shrugged and pulled it off. “If you insist.” He grabbed a towel from his closet, and Alex slipped past him to sit back on the bed, figuring he could keep working while Michael cleaned up. He was fast in the shower, unsurprisingly, and Alex avoided looking at him when he came out, hair wet and towel low on his hips. “Your turn. I’ve got a spare towel too, hang on.” Michael grabbed a green towel from his closet and handed it to Alex.

“Thanks.” He set his laptop aside and grabbed shower gel and shampoo from his bag after Michael had walked past. He put the seat down on the toilet and sat on it to remove his leg.

Michael was a surprisingly neat showerer, it seemed. The Airstream’s bathtub was small and rectangular, with the showerhead at faucet level at the far end closest to the window, just below the sink. There were counter surfaces around two sides of the tub, and Alex had expected them to be wet, but either Michael had wiped them with his towel, or had somehow managed not to splash them at all.

Alex knelt to wash, turning the shower off while he soaped himself up and scrubbed shampoo through his hair, washing his liner at the same time. He dried himself off as best he could while still in the tub, hidden from Michael’s eyes. Before he hopped out of the bathroom, he looked around at the water that had ricocheted off his shoulders and onto the counters, and frowned.

“Do you use your telekinesis to keep the water from splashing?” he asked as he came through to sit on the bed, reaching out to get fresh clothes from his bag.

“Hm? Oh, yeah.” Michael smiled, a crease appearing between his brows. He was in sweatpants and nothing else, sprawled across the bed, and Alex tried not to look at him. “How’d you know?”

“No water on the counters after you showered. It’s smart.”

“I’ve been known to have my moments.” Michael nudged him. “You’re staying, right?”

For the nightmares. Alex looked over his shoulder at him. “Would you mind?”

“I just offered.” Michael nudged him again, his knee gentle against Alex’s back. “Nah, I don’t mind. Stay.”

It was late, Alex rationalised. He was tired. And it made more sense to stay close to Michael, who could dispel haunts with a touch. “Okay.”

They worked for a little while longer before Michael caught Alex sneaking looks at his bare chest and grinned, eyes lidded and tongue peeking out between his lips for a second before he asked Alex if he saw something he liked.

Alex didn’t know whether to be honest or to pretend at being disinterested, so ended up not speaking at all, just reaching out to press his palm over Michael’s sternum. He watched the way Michael’s stomach jumped, the way his smile faded into something hungrier. He arched his back – shameless again – when Alex smoothed his hand down to his abdomen, chest hair surprisingly soft against his palm.

So that was round two. At least they both managed to get all their clothes off for it, Alex thought afterwards, panting, aftershocks still zinging up his spine. He’d never had his dick sucked with both legs over someone’s shoulders, body lifted half off the bed, and he was definitely a fan. It didn’t hurt that Michael hadn’t hesitated to touch his stump at all, even the very end of it. He was the only person who’d ever done that, not counting medical professionals. The only other man Alex had slept with since his injury had ignored it completely, which had been what Alex wanted at the time, but compared to Michael’s matter-of-fact acceptance of it, seemed lacking in hindsight.

He slid off the bed to reciprocate, pinning Michael’s knees apart and blowing him as slowly as he could, drawing it out until his jaw ached fiercely and Michael was shaking like a leaf. His hands were twisted in the sheets, knees squeezing Alex’s shoulders, and he made the most beautiful noises when Alex reached up to smooth his palm over his chest again, rubbing at one of his nipples, then the other.

They went to bed properly after that, and Alex pressed his forehead against the broad slope of Michael’s shoulders and swallowed down an urge to cry he didn’t understand. Everything in his head was a tangled mess, all of his resolutions crumbled, his convictions cracked. The desire to keep Michael at any sort of distance shrank the closer Michael was, and Alex despised himself for his weakness. 

He remembered his dad telling him his perversions made him weak. He remembered his brothers echoing that sentiment with fouler language. He remembered fighting against it, until he’d gotten Michael’s hand broken. And that had been his fault; if he hadn’t brought Michael back to the shed, if he hadn’t done exactly as his family had predicted and turned soft at the first hint of a boy liking him back, if he hadn’t been so pathetically desperate, Michael’s hand would be whole.

“Hey,” he whispered before he could talk himself out of it.

Michael shifted slightly. “Mm?”

“Do I sound haunted to you?”

“Hang on.” Michael wrapped his hand around the arm that Alex had wrapped over his waist and squeezed gently. “Should be fine now.”

“Thanks,” Alex whispered, despairing quietly. He felt no different. All his fucked-up thoughts and weaknesses were his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Ganzfeld Technique is a real thing you can try for yourself! Read more about it [here](https://arthurmag.com/2010/07/11/diy-magic-the-ganzfeld-technique/).
> 
> Also, to all of you who have been commenting, I love you so much, you are giving me LIFE, thank you so much, seriously.


	5. Saturday 28th August 2021

Alex woke up three times from nightmares. Each time, Michael dispelled the haunt and mumbled assurances that he didn’t mind, and Alex got more and more angry with himself. The final nightmare was an old one, barely haunted at all. In it, Alex was being marched out to the desert by his dad, with all his brothers, and they had to fight each other to be allowed to come home. Alex always lost, his movements slow and heavy, and for a moment when it seemed like he might win against Flint, his dad came over and admonished him disdainfully for cheating before taking away his prosthesis.

He fell on his back like a beetle, and couldn’t get up again. And when the leech came to punish him for his weakness, his brothers went home and his dad watched. He was always so disappointed, but in a way that conveyed how he had expected this result anyway.

Michael kissed his shoulder and fell asleep easily again, even though dawn was breaking. Alex lay awake for a long time before he drifted off, only able to do it when he turned to hide his face against Michael’s back, giving into temptation yet again.

When he woke for the final time, thankfully not from a nightmare, his phone read 9:34 and Michael was snoring. He mumbled and rolled over when Alex got out of bed to piss and shave, and opened his eyes sleepily when Alex came back in to put his prosthesis on, and then his iron bracelets and anklets. “Hey.”

“I’m stealing your truck,” Alex told him, and both loved and hated that it made Michael smile.

“Yeah?”

“I’m getting breakfast,” Alex said. “You want anything?”

“Whatever you’re getting.” Michael yawned and stretched, scratching his chest and pulling the sheet down to his belly button. Alex looked away and pulled a clean shirt out of his bag. 

He wanted to lean down and kiss Michael’s cheek. He wanted to crawl back into bed with him. Alex turned away and grabbed Michael’s keys from the table. “I’ll be quick.”

“Sounds good,” Michael mumbled, and Alex stepped outside, scanning the junkyard. The hubcab gazebo swayed in the breeze, and Alex steeled himself before looking at the horizon, the desert stretching away underneath it. It was fine for a second, and then it seemed to stretch further and further away, and Alex ripped his gaze away and headed quickly for Michael’s truck.

Were the haunts actually getting worse? Or was he just becoming more susceptible to them?

He put it from his mind and drove, eyeing the meter and heading for the nearest gas station first. He only put in twenty-five dollars’ worth, figuring that more would piss Michael off. 

He didn’t want to go to the Crashdown, not after so long, and knowing that neither of the Ortecho sisters would be there. He had to concentrate harder than usual on the drive into the town centre, ignoring the twisting shadows and odd shapes that flickered at the edges of his vision. It was getting worse, he was sure of it, and that feeling of being watched was in full force. He was sure that at any moment, everyone around him was suddenly going to start staring at him, and when they did he didn’t know what would happen to him, only that it would be very, very bad.

He drove slowly up Main Street, and pulled into the first space he saw. He regretted it the second he left the relative sanctuary of Michael’s truck, wishing he’d thought to look for a coffee shop literally anywhere but the town centre. He felt as exposed as if he was walking out naked, sure everyone recognised him. _Alex Manes, back in Roswell, gone for so long, someone should tell his father._

“No one cares,” he muttered under his breath, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets and holding onto Michael’s keys tightly. No one cared who he was. It was unlikely anyone would recognise him. No one would expect him to be back in Roswell. People didn’t care, why would they?

Rationality was having a hard time fighting against the haunted conviction that he was being noticed though. Noticed and noted and whispered about.

He shuddered and went into a place he and Michael had walked past yesterday. Bean Me Up was certainly a name that fit with the town aesthetic, and he was sure he would have hated it as a kid. It smelled good inside though, and the familiar bitter scent of good coffee helped ease a little of his discomfort. 

When they’d walked the centre yesterday Michael had seen something on the upper floor that for Alex hadn’t been visible at all, but now he was in here he could feel something. Like darkness, oily and sticky, sitting heavy above his head. Like a rain cloud – the image popped into his head suddenly of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh and his rain cloud of depression. It was like that. Dripping down through him and turning him cold.

Just a haunt, he told himself, and counted his breaths as he looked at the pastries under the glass case at the front. He ordered two coffees and possibly too much food, and only realised how cold his hands were when he wrapped his hand around the cups to slot them into a cardboard carrier. It felt like everyone was watching him, giving him looks out of the corners of their eyes. Whispering, muttering, gossiping about him. It made his skin crawl, and he didn’t look at anyone as he turned to leave.

He had his head down to avoid the sky as he stepped out, and cursed when he almost immediately walked into someone. He looked up to apologise, and froze.

Kyle Valenti stared at him, and Alex noticed in a distant sort of way that he looked rough as hell. His eyes were red-rimmed, his stubble was patchy, his hair was a mess, and he looked almost gaunt. And despite all of that, he was still irritatingly good-looking, and Alex despised himself for noticing.

“Alex?”

Alex wished for a second that he looked different enough from his teenage self to pretend not to recognise Kyle in return, but he knew that would never work. So he sighed and stepped out of the way of the door. “Valenti.” He made to walk on, but Kyle moved closer, not quite getting in his way but sudden enough to make it clear that he wanted to talk.

“Wait, Alex –”

“What?” Alex asked calmly. He looked everywhere but Kyle, and wanted to shake himself when he realised what he was doing, keeping his back to a wall and scanning the area for suspicious activity, for people on the rooftops opposite. If he was attacked, he could throw the coffee at them as a distraction and run – except that wasn’t right, he knew how to defend himself. His mind was whirring, and he made himself give at least a fraction more of his attention to Kyle.

“I…” Kyle stared at him. “What’re you doing here?”

“Work.” Alex lifted a shoulder, pretending he wasn’t about to shake out of his skin. “Just a job. Don’t worry, I’m not sticking around.” He made to leave again, and this time Kyle reached out to stop him, though he pulled his arm back before he actually made contact. 

“Wait, hang on –”

Alex took a step away to cover the way he’d flinched from Kyle’s hand. “_What?_”

Kyle looked stumped when Alex faced him though, eyes wide and unblinking. “Uh. How, how’re you doing?” he asked haltingly, and Alex shook his head, almost laughing.

“Seriously? I don’t think it’s any of your business, Valenti. And I have somewhere to be, so if you don’t mind –”

“Wait, Alex, hang on, please?”

It was the please that got him. Alex paused, eyes still narrow with suspicion, and watched Kyle rub both hands over his face. He didn’t speak again, just waited. A part of him was curious to know what Kyle was so keen to say – he would have thought something sneering if it wasn’t for how tired Kyle looked.

“I always told myself if I ever saw you again I’d say this,” Kyle muttered, shifting sideways so they were both out of the way of the other pedestrians on the sidewalk. Alex couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was listening in, watching like they were on a stage, but it seemed to help that his own attention was so focused on Kyle now.

“Can’t wait to hear this,” he said sarcastically. 

“I’m sorry.” Kyle met his eyes, bloodshot but honest, and Alex shook his head again, lip curling.

“You’re sorry?”

“Yeah.” Kyle took a deep breath, and Alex was so uninterested, but there was a vindictive, childish part of him that wanted to hear it, and another part of himself buried even further under that that was still heartbroken that his best friend in the world had turned on him so cruelly. “Listen,” Kyle went on, lowering his voice. “I was an asshole. I never should’ve acted like I did, I don’t even know why I –” 

“Oh fuck you,” Alex snapped, old, deeply buried hurt suddenly so sharp it was making his throat ache. He was thirteen all over again and Kyle had told all the other kids in their class that Alex cried when Mufasa died in The Lion King, and he told them that Alex liked Brokeback Mountain even though he’d never even seen it, and he laughed when Millie Becks refused to share a desk with Alex because everyone decided overnight that he had AIDS. “You know why you acted like that.”

He expected Kyle to get defensive, to deny it. He frowned when Kyle laughed, a cracked sort of sound, and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Because you were gay.”

“And you didn’t want people to think you were too,” Alex said tightly, and Kyle nodded again.

“Yeah. I was…I was the worst, shittiest friend, and I’m really sorry. I’m not, I’m not asking for you to forgive me or anything like that, I know I don’t deserve it, but I always told myself I’d apologise if I ever saw you in person again. Figures it’d be during the worst week of my life.” His laugh was awful, and for a moment Alex had to push down instinctive concern.

“I’ve been through worse by now,” he said, wrong-footed. “I’m sure you’ve heard.”

“Yeah.” Kyle sighed and rubbed at his face again, pressing his fingertips into the corners of his eyes. “For what it’s worth, I’m really glad you came home. You’re outta the Air Force now, right? You’re a…I don’t know, I heard you’re a shade these days?”

“Yeah.” Was he really doing this? Alex looked down at the coffee cups and paper bag of pastries he was holding and shook his head. “I should get going. I really am here for work.”

“Look, if you…I don’t know, if you want to get a beer or something, it’s on me.” Kyle swallowed. “I know it’s really…it’s, I swear this isn’t, I didn’t apologise to you to try and get something out of you, I’m not doing that. Shit, I’m sorry.” He laughed again, and Alex was disturbed to hear how it sounded like he was about to cry. “I’m usually way more articulate than this. I haven’t been sleeping.” He shook his head, looking away. “Bad week, like I said. But, uh. If you do wanna…I don’t know…”

“What are you asking me for, Kyle?” Alex asked at last, exasperated.

“Your expertise, I guess.” Kyle pushed his hand through his hair. “As a shade. I’ve just been…I don’t know, this week…I’ve been wondering if I’m cursed or something. Is that…? It’s probably confidential, whatever you’re doing, forget I asked.” He flapped his hand, exhaustion in every line of his body, and Alex winced internally. “I don’t wanna bother you. It was good to see you.” Kyle gave him a horrible attempt at a smile and made to turn away, and Alex groaned.

“Wait.” 

Kyle looked at him uncertainly, body half turned away, and Alex gave him a long, hard look. He catalogued everything he could, including the way Kyle’s hand was trembling slightly, and the way he was swaying in place. This week, he’d said, and it couldn’t be a coincidence that that was the length of time Max and Isobel had been missing. Kyle had never been sensitive when they were kids, but he looked fucking harrowed right now, and Alex couldn’t shake the feeling that it was connected.

“Give me your number,” Alex said finally. “If I have time, I’ll see if I can squeeze you in.”

Kyle hesitated. “I meant it,” he said. “I don’t wanna bother you. I can try Guerin, I know he hates my guts, but he knows his stuff.”

“Just give me your number, Valenti,” Alex snapped. “Unless you have a problem with that?”

Kyle’s eyes widened at the suggestion, and then he frowned and shook his head. “If you’re sure.”

“I wouldn’t have offered otherwise, would I?” Alex got his phone out of his pocket and created a new contact, passing it to Kyle. “Go on. I really do need to be somewhere.” He watched Kyle’s hands on his phone, clumsy and slow, and took it back when he was done. “Good. I’ll text you, if I can.”

“Thank you.” Kyle took a step back. “I guess…I’ll maybe see you around?”

“Maybe. Bye.” Alex turned away before he could overthink it. 

Michael was awake when Alex got back to the Airsteam, almost vibrating out of his skin with haunt-induced paranoia. “Coffee, bagels, pastries,” he said to announce his presence as he climbed in, feeling inexplicably wobbly on his prosthesis as he did so.

“Sweet.” Michael took the coffee cup Alex handed him with a relieved sigh and drank about half at once. 

Alex sat down on the armchair, which had been cleared of the piles of clothes, and took a bite of an almond croissant that tasted of nothing.

“Hey.” 

He looked up and stared as Michael got up and came over to touch his shoulder. The wobbly feeling faded, and the pastry in his mouth suddenly tasted of butter and almonds. He swallowed, watching Michael take a bagel from the table on his way back to the tall chair. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I saw Kyle just now.” Michael made a noise that managed to convey both sympathy and disgust. Alex ate another bite of croissant and chewed and swallowed before adding, “I said I’d text him.”

“_Why?_” Michael asked. “That asshole doesn’t deserve the time of day from you.”

“He was my best friend when we were kids.”

“You experiencing amnesia about the shit he put you through in school?” Michael huffed. “He hit you!”

Alex shrugged. “That was the least of it.” In truth, he would have preferred more of the physical bullying. It was the social aspect of it that had always hurt the most. “He said sorry though.”

“When? Did his daddy make him?” Michael sneered.

“Just now.” He had no idea what it was about Michael’s derision that made him want to defend Kyle Valenti of all people, but he was already having such a weird week. By this point, he was just rolling with it. “I think he meant it,” he said quietly. “Seriously, I think he knows what a dick he was. He said he didn’t even want my forgiveness, because he knew he didn’t deserve it.” 

Michael had nothing to say to that. When Alex looked up, he was frowning too. “Was he high?” he asked after a second.

“No. He looked bad though. Really bad. I think…” Alex hesitated. “I think he needs a shade.”

“A licenced one?” Michael sneered, and Alex shook his head, a humourless smile twisting at his mouth.

“No, he mentioned you, but said you hate him.”

“He’s not wrong.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Why do you hate him?”

Michael stared at him like he was an idiot. “Okay, I usually avoid repeating myself, but are you experiencing amnesia about the shit he put you through in school?”

It was really, really stupid that a little part of Alex warmed right through at that. It was drowned out pretty quick by irritation. “I don’t need a protector.”

“Did you ever see me jumping to your defence?” Michael asked sharply. “You weren’t the only person he was an asshole to, y’know. I wasn’t exactly winning any popularity contests being the weird kid who wore the same outfit every day in a row for three months and lived in his truck.”

Alex remembered people laughing about Michael’s clothes. He’d forgotten, but he remembered now, how people had pretended that Michael smelled like a hobo. He nodded, conceding the point. “Well he did say you knew your stuff,” he said, which was as much of an apology as he could muster. “The only reason he hasn’t already tried coming to you is because he knows you hate him.”

“Good,” Michael muttered. “Honestly, I’m not exactly cut up over the thought of him suffering a little.”

“I get that.” Alex chewed the inside of his cheek and looked down at his phone again. “And I really hate saying this, but I have a feeling. Mimi mentioned Kyle, told me I should be friends with him again, and the way she talked about Jim was weird. Similar to the way she talked about my dad.”

“This whole town’s haunted,” Michael said, putting his half-empty cup down on the table so he could gesture with both hands. “You seriously wanna take time out of what we’re doing to check on Kyle Valenti? Kyle ‘still thinks AIDS jokes are peak humour’ Valenti?”

“Pretty sure Doctor Valenti has different opinions on AIDS these days,” Alex couldn’t resist saying, and absolutely deserved the glare Michael gave him in response. “Look, I wouldn’t even be suggesting this if I didn’t think there was a chance it could be related to your family’s disappearance.”

Michael didn’t look convinced, and got up to pace to the back of the trailer, then down again, feet heavy on the narrow walkway. “I don’t like him.”

“Well we’ve got that in common.” Alex took another sip of coffee before deciding it was too cold to finish. “He was a dick to me, and I’m definitely not forgiving him any time soon, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s feeling the effects of the haunt more than anyone else I’ve seen so far. You were right when you said most people aren’t feeling it; they’re acting like nothing’s happening. Kyle’s cognizant enough of the haunt to know that’s what’s happening to him, and for someone as insensitive as Kyle Valenti to notice supernatural activity, he must be getting beaten around the head with it. He did look like he hadn’t slept for a week,” he added dryly.

“And again, not exactly broken up about that,” Michael muttered, and Alex had to agree, even if it was silently.

“I’m going to text him and arrange to meet up with him today, if I can. Mimi was so confused, I don’t know if any of what she said is useful. This could be better; it could point us in a clearer direction.”

Michael rubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. “You honestly think it’ll help us find Max and Isobel?”

“I do.”

“Fine. What’re you gonna do then?” Michael accepted the new track of action so fast it made Alex blink, caught off-guard for a second. “You can’t just kill the influence like I can. How does a real shade deal with something like this?”

“You are a real shade,” Alex said, annoyed, and his stomach flipped when Michael’s expression softened for a second. “Standard protocol is to kill the influence at the source by exorcising or otherwise removing the haunt. Since I can’t do that, I’ll go traditional.”

“Which is?”

Alex lifted one hand so his bracelet showed. “Salt and iron. I don’t know how religious Kyle is these days, but some prayers and blessings can go a long way for some people. Getting him to create his own protection charms, that can help. Different things work for different people, I’d just have to figure out what works for him.”

“Sounds like a therapy session,” Michael said distastefully.

Alex shook his head. “Nothing that complicated. I want to know what he’ll say though. I’d bet good money he’s been having nightmares too, and those are good things to compare notes on.”

Michael’s sneer vanished, chin tipping back in understanding. “I’ve worked jobs where people were sharing dreams before. You think he’ll’ve been having the same sorta nightmares as you?”

“Maybe,” Alex nodded. “It’d be good to compare symptoms of the haunt too, see if it’s different for everyone, or if it adapts depending on the target.”

“You’re talking like it’s sentient.” Michael raised an eyebrow, and Alex felt himself twitch. “What, do you think it is?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. This whole thing is slightly complicated by the alien angle.”

“Oh, slightly?” Michael’s other eyebrow went up as well, and Alex had to bite back an urge to smile.

“Yeah, slightly. Maybe the haunt is a manifestation of one of your siblings’ subconscious. There’s anecdotal evidence of sensitive people exacerbating haunts they encounter. Who knows what affect a sensitive alien could have?”

“We don’t make it worse.” Michael shuttered. “Just touching a distortion is enough to destroy it for us.”

Alex lifted his hands, shrugging. “How much experimentation have Max and Isobel done compared to you? Their abilities might diverge from yours the same way their other powers do.”

Michael scowled. “They wouldn’t do this.”

“Not on purpose, maybe. Look, we don’t know,” Alex said, cutting off what he could see would turn into an argument. “There’s too much we don’t know. I’m going to text Kyle and see if he’s free today for me to try a few things. Do you want to come or not?”

Michael shifted on his feet, frowning like he hadn’t expected to be offered a choice in the matter. “Did you tell him we were working together?”

“No.”

Whatever Michael thought of that, it wasn’t good, but Alex couldn’t tell why. “He knows I hate him,” Michael said, eyes narrow.

“So? I’m not exactly his number one fan either. If you want him to know we’re working together, that’s up to you. But if we go in together, you’ll need to back my play, whatever I do.”

“Why’s that?” Michael asked, prickly, and Alex forced himself not to react defensively.

“Because I don’t want him thinking there’s anything unusual about you at all. Maria’s one thing, Kyle’s another. I don’t want him thinking you’re anything but what you pretend to be.”

Michael smirked. “Worried about my safety, shade?”

He was infuriating. Alex wanted to stand up and shake him until he took the situation seriously, and he had to remind himself of Michael’s freak-out the night before last to push the urge down. Michael was scared and deflecting from it. Alex wasn’t stupid enough not to realise that. “He’ll also react better to me,” he said evenly. “He feels bad about how he treated me when we were kids, and I can use that. He doesn’t have the same history with you, and that might make him less likely to open up.”

Michael’s mouth pinched again, and he worked his jaw for a second before nodding. “Fine. Set up your date, I’ll stay here and keep crunching data or whatever you call it.”

Alex had to bite back another smile, and marvelled inwardly at how fast Michael could turn his mood around. Being around him was like being on the edge of a tornado, pulled and yanked around in a different direction every two seconds with no control over it. He couldn’t figure out whether it was exhilarating or awful.

Alex finished off his pastry with one hand and texted Kyle with the other. 

**To: Valenti [10:29]**  
It’s Alex. Freed up some time, are you available today?

The response was almost instant.

**From: Valenti [10:29]**  
Available whenever you are. I’ll buy you lunch if you want?

“Wow.”

“What?” 

“Valenti just offered to buy me lunch.” Alex snorted. “The world really is upside down.”

“You gonna go?” Michael didn’t sound pleased.

“Makes sense for me to.” Alex looked up at him, showing nothing. “The sooner I do this, the sooner we know if I’m onto something or not.” He held Michael’s gaze, waiting to see if he would protest. He wasn’t entirely certain what Michael’s problem was. It didn’t strike him as plain dislike, but he didn’t think it could be jealousy either.

Whatever it was, Michael ceded to the logic of Alex’s point, however grudgingly. “Fine. You wanna take my truck again?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Long as you don’t crash it.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Alex said dryly, taking another pastry out of the paper bag. “I’ll work here with you for a few hours then.”

“We could go down to the bunker if you want,” Michael offered. “It’ll be cooler, and there’re proper tables.”

“Yeah,” Alex decided. “That sounds good.”

It wasn’t quite as good as he’d hoped – the lack of windows started making Alex feel claustrophobic about an hour in, but he kept a lid on it as best he could. It was easier to sink into the work with an actual desk to put his laptop on, even if Michael’s adapted plug sockets made him twitch. 

“This shelter was built before fibre optic,” Michael said when he caught Alex staring at the taped-up wires. “You’re lucky we get service down here at all.”

Around one, Alex and Michael climbed out of the bunker, Alex to go and meet Kyle, Michael to work on a car Sanders had asked him to take a look at.

“Gotta earn my keep,” he said, putting his hat on his head as his trailer scraped back over the bunker hatch. “Catch.” He threw Alex his keys, and frowned when he caught them, seeming to pull into himself a little. “Look, just be careful, alright?”

“I can handle Valenti,” Alex assured him, unimpressed. 

“I know. Doesn’t mean you should have to, is all.”

Alex had absolutely no idea what to do with that, and covered his sudden weird uncertainty by ducking into the trailer to get his bag. “I’ll make it as quick as I can,” he said, not meeting Michael’s eyes as he came out. “I’ll text you when I’m done.”

“Okay.”

Alex sat for a moment in the cab of Michael’s pickup, and texted Kyle again. They’d agreed on a when but not a where for their meeting.

**To: Valenti [13:14]**  
Leaving now, lmk where to meet you.

It was entirely too tempting to drive around the edge of town before heading into the centre, skirting the hauntings as much as possible. But it would have eaten into the amount of gas he was already using, so he put some salt in his shoes, twisted the iron around his wrists, and started driving into town.

It was definitely a sign of how much worse the haunt was getting that he could be wearing solid iron and still be feeling its effects so strongly. He kept the radio off as he drove, just listening to the quiet background rumble of the engine and the sound of other vehicles on the road. It meant he was more alert, and less startled when he heard the sound of hooves. 

Cowboys and aliens. He smiled to himself and kept his eyes on the road, ignoring the indistinct, blurry shape of riders out to the east of the road. He could hear the horses like they were right next to him, could smell something he assumed was animal in nature. He wasn’t familiar enough with horses to know what they smelled like, but the sound of their hooves on the dirt was oddly soothing, a rhythmic counterpart to the sound of the engine.

_Crack._

Alex ducked and swerved completely off the road. Instinct told him to speed up, to keep his head down and gun it, and logic barely overtook him in time to keep his foot off the pedal. Another loud _crack_ of gunshot made him flinch, and he slowed Michael’s truck down and put it in neutral so he could slowly lift his head and look behind him.

The cowboy ghosts were wheeling their horses around. Four of them, three against one, who was lasting an improbably long time. Looking at them made the noises worse, and Alex flinched again as several more gunshots echoed soundlessly through his head. They sounded completely different from the guns he was used to, which had been what had fooled him into thinking they were real. 

That, and the fact that his brain was now hardwired to associate sudden gunfire with horrific injury and death. He noted down his physical reactions as if they were happening to someone else – heart rate through the roof, numbness in his fingers, cold everywhere, sweating under his arms. 

“Right,” he muttered, and made another note that he was hyperventilating a little bit too. “Right. Okay. Cool. _Fuck._” Breathe, he just needed to breathe. In for four, hold for four, out for four. He checked his watch – 13:18 – and focused on his hands, touching his fingertips to his thumbs in time with his counting. In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Somewhere in there he managed to put the handbrake on and turn off the engine.

It was 13:33 when he felt steady again, breathing and heart rate close to normal, numbness gone. He was still abnormally cold, but he doubted he would be able to sort that without getting out of the truck and doing some jumping jacks or something. And the chill could be an effect of the haunt as much as an effect of his adrenaline-fuelled fear.

_zzzZZZZZZZZ_

Alex jumped and scowled at the air. “Oh, fuck off!”

His hand trembled ever so slightly as he got his phone out of his pocket, figuring now was as good a time as any to check whether Kyle had responded, which he had. 

**From: Valenti [13:16]**  
Burrito Factory is always quick  
**From: Valenti [13:30]**  
Here now.

Well, fuck it. So what if he was late? Kyle wasn’t an official client anyway.

The Burrito Factory was where it had been his whole life, standing in all its shabby glory in a windowless adobe building that couldn’t have looked less like a factory. Birds were drinking from holes in the asphalt, filled with water from yesterday’s rain. There were a couple of cars outside, and Alex kind of hated how recognisable Michael’s pickup was as he pulled in next to them. Almost as soon as he got out, Kyle climbed out of the car furthest from him, a black BMW.

“Hey.” He still looked like total shit, now with an added layer of visible nervousness. “Wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“You eat already?” Alex asked, and Kyle shook his head. “How’s your appetite been? Normal or…?”

Kyle blinked, and stumbled when he went to follow Alex inside. “Uh, I haven’t been eating as much, I don’t think. Not as regularly. Is that a thing, like a symptom?”

“Can be.” He ignored Kyle in favour of ordering, part of him easing up a little when Kyle didn’t try to pay for his burrito and water. He waited for Kyle to order, and they stood in silence next to the only other customer; a large white man with a red baseball cap and dusty work boots. Alex only felt a trickle of unease after he noticed Kyle darting looks at the guy, and concentrated a little harder.

The man behind the counter looked and had sounded Mexican, and the glimpse of movement Alex could see through the hatch to the kitchen gave away nothing about whoever was working back there. If he was feeling uneasy, he wondered how Kyle was feeling. Out of nowhere, he remembered Maria telling him about someone’s food truck getting burned down. Remembered too the crimes listed in the database on Max’s work laptop, the assaults and the attacks.

The other man’s order was called, and he went forward to get his burrito and leave. Alex tried to get a good look at his face as he did, and kept himself very, very still when he realised that his eyes were sliding right off him. He was looking, but he wasn’t seeing anything. It was like the guy had no face at all – all Alex could pick up on was the impression of eyes like dark pits.

He waited until they were outside to ask Kyle as casually as possible, “The guy who was ahead of us in the line –”

“You saw that?” Kyle exhaled heavily. “Shit, okay, at least I’m not going crazy.”

“What did you see, exactly?”

“I don’t know.” Kyle swallowed and rubbed one hand over his cheek. “Just...shit, I don’t know. I wanna say a demon, but that doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

“It might.” There was a tiny park just up the road, and Alex started walking, Kyle falling in step beside him. “What did you see, specifically? Describe it.”

“I don’t know,” Kyle said again, frustrated. While Alex unwrapped his burrito and started to eat, Kyle just held his, held loosely in his hand like he’d forgotten it. “I didn’t recognise him. I thought his hat might be – but it wasn’t, so that’s not...I couldn’t see, I don’t know if I can describe his face. It looked wrong, I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“His hat,” Alex repeated, frowning sideways at him. “You thought it was, what, a MAGA hat?”

“Yeah, for a second.”

“Does that usually put you on edge so much?”

“No. Just this week. I mean it’s never exactly a thrill, but it’s not unusual. This week’s been so weird, I don’t even know where to begin.”

“When did you first think something might be wrong?” Alex asked. This, he knew how to do. This was routine for him, and oddly calming in its familiarity.

“I had the same dreams three nights in a row. I usually sleep really well, I’m out like a – you remember.” Kyle smiled at the ground, sort of emptily. “Practically had to set off a cannon to wake me up in the mornings, and that hasn’t changed. But I’ve been up every couple of hours at least since last Thursday. I know it was then because there was a power outage.”

“There was?” Alex stared at him. “I didn’t hear anything about that.”

“Ah, it was tiny, just a blip. Happened around two in the morning, while I was on my shift.”

“When you say it was just a blip, how long did it last?”

Kyle shrugged. “Less than a minute. Less than thirty seconds, barely enough time for the backup generators to kick in before they weren’t needed. Is that relevant?”

Alex made a non-committal noise through a mouthful of burrito, pretending his mind wasn’t racing with excitement. If Max had caused that power outage, that meant he could give Michael a window of time for his disappearance.

Kyle sighed and looked down again. “What else do you wanna know?”

“What you’ve been experiencing.” Alex ate another mouthful, and when Kyle said nothing, he elaborated. “Any haunt activity you’ve seen, heard, smelled, or otherwise sensed.”

“Like…” Kyle trailed off, and Alex pushed down a surge of irritation. Just because Kyle had been a raging asshole to him in school didn’t mean Alex should treat him any differently than he would a normal client. “Like what?”

“Seeing, hearing, smelling, or otherwise sensing supernatural things.”

“Okay, but such as?” 

It was kind of a relief to hear a note of irritation in Kyle’s voice. “I don’t want to tell you what I’ve been noticing in case it influences you,” Alex told him. “But you exist in the world, you know what classic haunting activity looks like.”

“Well I haven’t been hearing voices,” Kyle said, frowning at the ground. “I haven’t seen any dead relatives. It’s just been…I mean, the nightmares have been the worst.”

“Okay, so tell me about those.” Alex nodded ahead to an empty picnic bench as they reached the park. “Let’s sit, you can talk.”

“Yeah.” Kyle looked incredibly uncomfortable, but went to sit opposite Alex anyway, finally unwrapping his burrito and taking a small, half-hearted bite. “They’re all pretty similar. I’m myself in them, and I’m on the run.”

Alex loved it when he was right. “What else?”

“They don’t really have a narrative or anything. It’s just me, running. From the military.” Kyle shot him a conflicted look. “From your dad, sometimes.”

“That’d give anyone nightmares,” Alex said dryly, and Kyle snorted.

“Yeah. You remember the time he made us camp out to teach us extreme weather survival?”

It was tempting to tell him to stay on track, but the more relaxed Kyle was, the more he might say, so Alex nodded. “Out at your dad’s cabin. He’d gone home for the night, so my dad concocted a brand new form of kiddie torture.”

“We still got back in though.” Kyle gave him a small smile, and Alex clamped down viciously on the wistful nostalgia that rose in him at that. He hadn’t allowed himself to miss Kyle Valenti since eighth grade, and he wasn’t about to start now. “We made a good team.”

“Yeah, before you grew one chest hair and instantly became a nightmare of a bully,” Alex reminded him flatly. “Tell me more about your dreams.”

“Right.” Kyle’s smile vanished. “Sorry. Uh, I don’t know…it’s your dad chasing me sometimes, like I said.”

“Where were you?” Alex asked. “Anywhere you knew?”

“Here, mostly. Roswell.” Kyle frowned, like he was trying to remember. 

“Mostly?”

“Yeah. Sometimes it wasn’t. Or like, I thought it was, but it wasn’t anywhere I recognised?”

“Was it still recognisably a town, or somewhere completely different?” Alex set his burrito aside to get his phone out to take notes.

“A town, but like, with buildings I’d never seen before. And there was a prison a few times. He wanted – they, I mean, the military – they wanted to lock me up, I don’t know why. A couple of times I think because I was an alien, in the dream.” Kyle rolled his eyes. “This town, right?”

“Right,” Alex agreed, dark. “Go on, what else do you remember?”

“Not much. I was just scared outta my mind most of the time, constantly running. I’ve been waking up out of breath, like I’ve just run a marathon. Sometimes it’s like I’ve been in a warzone, sometimes I’m trying to get to the hospital because they need me there, and I have this feeling like if I can prove I’m…I don’t know, of use? I’ll stand a chance or something.”

“Okay.” Alex wrote it all down, brain whirring. “Anything else? Anything at all, any detail could be helpful.”

“Seriously?”

“You’d be surprised.” Alex looked up and shrugged. “I had a client once who was having recurring dreams because of a haunt – turned out that she was dreaming from the ghost’s point of view, and we only figured it out because she realised she wasn’t wearing glasses in her dream.”

“Okay.” Kyle frowned, putting his burrito down and rubbing both hands over his face. “Crap, wish I’d written something down.” Alex waited, eating his own lunch. Patience was a virtue he’d had plenty of practice exercising. “The way things looked was different,” Kyle said finally, slow, forehead still resting in his hands and eyes half-closed. “The town, I mean. It didn’t look like anywhere I’d ever seen before, which is weird for me. I usually dream of people and places I already know, even if they’re all jumbled up.”

Alex bit back a comment on Kyle’s lack of imagination and just waited.

“I recognised some things,” Kyle went on in a low voice. “My old neighbourhood. The high school, Main Street…I almost never went inside,” he said, as if just realising it. “I’m pretty much always outside. The hospital’s the only exception, if I ever make it there, and then it just turns into something more like a normal stress dream.” He took a deep breath. “The buildings I don’t recognise, they’re pretty generic, most of the time. They look kinda like parts of Detroit I’ve been. More glass, way more modern than Roswell’s ever been.”

“More glass?”

“Yeah, like skyscrapers.” Kyle dropped one hand and ran the other through his hair, screwing his eyes closed for a moment. “Like…weird buildings. Alien, kinda, like they wouldn’t look outta place on the cover of a classic sci-fi book.”

“How do you know what that looks like?” Alex couldn’t stop himself asking.

“Had a roommate who was really into it,” Kyle shrugged. “And I dated a girl who made me read _The Left Hand of Darkness_ before she’d agree to go on a second date with me.”

“You must’ve really liked her,” Alex said dryly, and Kyle grinned.

“I did, and it wasn’t even a bad book. At least it was short – she always said she could’ve made me read _Dune._”

Alex shook his head, a little unnerved by how nice Kyle was being. People could change, he was aware of that in an abstract sort of way. It was just that in his experience, people didn’t. “Let’s get back to the dreams, and the weird buildings. They seem to be standing out for you?”

“Yeah. I don’t know, I’ve been…I uh, I got lost, yesterday. On the way from my apartment to the hospital.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Where do you live?”

“Raintree Complex. It’s just a block down from Stiles Park.”

Alex opened and closed his mouth, and genuinely tried to sound as non-judgemental as possible when he said, “It’s like, a straight line from there to Main Street, and then straight up to the hospital.”

“I know, okay? Believe me, I know.” Kyle laughed, strangled. “I was half an hour late. This town is the size of a freaking postage stamp, and I got lost.”

“How? When did you notice, do you remember exactly how it happened?”

Kyle shook his head and laughed again, and Alex noticed that there were goose bumps on his bare arms, the skin pimpled and hairs raised. “You drive the same route every single day, you sort of blank it. I don’t know, I don’t know exactly when…I guess before I hit Main Street? It’s like ten blocks in a straight line, but I blinked and realised I had no fucking clue where I was.”

“You didn’t recognise it?”

“Yeah.” Kyle looked down at his hands. “And y’know, sure, I haven’t driven down every single street in Roswell, but how the fuck do you get lost driving in a straight line?” He was sounding more freaked out by the second, and Alex rapped his knuckles on the table.

“Hey.” Kyle looked at him, eyes wide and bloodshot, and Alex frowned. “Calm down, okay? You’re not lost now. It’s over, you got out. Tell me how you did that.”

Kyle shivered, and Alex wondered if he even knew he was doing it. “Kept driving till I recognised something.”

“In a straight line the whole time?”

“No. I took a few turns. A lot of turns. Couldn’t figure out…I don’t know, it felt like the right thing to do at the time.”

“You got out,” Alex repeated. “That’s the important thing.”

“Is this normal?” Kyle asked, and Alex recognised the tone. Almost begging, frightened, and it was weird to realise how much he disliked hearing it from Kyle. It wasn’t like him at all; Kyle had always been so sure of himself in everything. His confidence had been one of the things that had drawn Alex to him when they were children. It was the sort of iron assurance that came from knowing he was important and loved, Alex had figured out much later. Kyle had never, ever doubted that he was valued, and that he had people – family – in his life who would always care about him, no matter what. Unconditional love and acceptance gave people an armour that Alex imagined was very hard to crack.

He took a breath and cocked his head. “Getting lost in a familiar environment? Yes.”

Kyle relaxed a fraction. “Does it mean anything?”

“It usually means it’s the location that’s haunted, not you.”

“But I’ve been feeling like this _everywhere_, not in any specific place.” Kyle frowned at him. “Are you saying the whole town is haunted?”

“It’s a working theory. But it’s what I’ve got right now.” Alex sighed and finished his burrito, balling up the wrapped and tucking it into one of the gaps in the planks that made up the table of the picnic bench. 

“You got a plan on dealing with it?”

“Working on it.” Alex jerked his chin at him. “Let’s get back to you. What else have you experienced?”

Kyle exhaled, a long breath through pursed lips. “Okay, um. Feeling kinda…on edge, just. All the time. Especially when I’m on my own, especially at night. Like…you remember when we watched _The Devil’s Trap_ and we didn’t fall asleep till the sun came up because we were so freaked out by every single tiny noise and shadow?”

He actually hated the way Kyle was pressing the nostalgia so hard. Alex restricted himself to a tight little nod. “Yeah.”

“Like that feeling. Like, I’m sleeping with the lights on.” Kyle snorted and ran his hand through his hair again. “It’s pathetic.”

“Again, very normal.” Alex looked directly at him. “What else?”

Kyle was quiet for several long seconds, and Alex was almost about to prompt him again when he spoke, looking off to the side. “I know there’s plenty of legitimate stuff in my life worth blaming myself for,” he said slowly. “The way I treated you is far from the only thing I regret. But this week, I’ve been feeling…I haven’t felt like this since the time I lost my first patient.”

Alex blinked, and realised suddenly that he had no idea what kind of doctor Kyle was. “You’re a surgeon?”

“Yeah.” Kyle’s jaw worked. “So I’ve seen people die. And it took me a long time to get it into my head that when that happens, it isn’t because I’ve killed them – it’s because I couldn’t save them. There’s a difference, y’know? Or that’s what I’ve been told, what I’ve been telling myself. This week’s been…it sounds completely stupid.” Alex waited, and Kyle sighed, pressing both hands over his face again. “I just feel like…like, I don’t know, like I’m at fault for every single terrible thing that happens around me. It sounds dumb, right? Completely overemotional, like…like a reaction to being sleep-deprived, except I’ve been sleep-deprived plenty of times, and it’s never been like this.”

“Haunts can influence your emotions,” Alex said quietly. “It isn’t talked about so much, because people don’t like talking about it, but it’s real. You know your own mind best – if this is unusual for you, that’s worth taking note of.”

“It’s freaking me out. I don’t know what to do.” Kyle rubbed his eyes. “It is unusual. And it’s getting worse, I keep…I’ve never…” He trailed off and shook his head, staring off over Alex’s shoulder with glassy eyes.

Alex licked his lips and hesitated, but it was a standard question, and it might be relevant. “Have you felt like you’re being pushed in a particular direction? Like, intrusive thoughts or daydreams where you act unlike yourself?”

“Yeah.” Kyle shivered again, and Alex frowned.

“Are you cold?”

“No. Yeah.” Kyle looked down at his own arms and blinked. “Shit. Yeah. What the hell?”

“Common side-effect. These intrusive thoughts, what are they?”

Kyle shook his head. “Barely anything, just little…I don’t know, daydreams, I guess, like you said. But I can tell they’re going to get worse.”

“How do you act in them?” Alex pressed, and Kyle rubbed his hands over his arms and scowled.

“Suicidally, okay? And yeah, that’s very unlike me, before you ask.”

Alex had been expecting the thoughts to be of violence, but this was worse. He nodded and got his phone again to note it down. “Okay. That isn’t unusual.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” Kyle muttered.

“The important thing is that you know it’s unusual,” Alex told him. “A lot of people struggle to distinguish the influence from their own mind, so this is good. Recognising the problem for what it is is good.”

Kyle snorted. “You sound like a doctor.”

“Coming from an actual doctor, I’ll take that as a compliment. Have you experienced anything else? Anything visual or auditory?”

“Not really. I don’t think so.”

“Anything else that you think might be useful?”

“I don’t think so.” Kyle sighed, and finally picked up his burrito again, though he didn’t move to eat any of it. “You think it’s the town that’s haunted?”

Alex shrugged. “It’s a working theory. You definitely aren’t the only one affected, if that helps.”

“No one else seems to be.”

“I have been.” Alex regretted saying it the second the words were out of his mouth, wanting to snarl at Kyle for looking at him with such sudden relief and interest.

“Yeah? Has it been the same for you? Like, the same symptoms?”

“No.” Alex put his phone away. “I haven’t figured out what the nexus of the general haunt is yet, but there are some things you could do in the meantime as interim stopgaps, to lessen the influence it’s having on you.”

He was surprised when Kyle nodded, allowing the subject change without even looking annoyed. “I’ve put salt across the doors and windows of my apartment?”

“That’s a start. Salt’s always helpful, even if it’s chemical.”

“What do you mean?”

“Table salt is processed. You knew that, right?”

Kyle shrugged, looking down at his burrito and lifting it reluctantly to his mouth. “I guess. Does it matter?”

“Can do. The less refined, the better. I use rock salt. You can buy salt from people who make their own too – like, artisanal or whatever.” He rolled his eyes. “That doesn’t matter, in my experience. And even table salt works in a pinch. The sodium content is basically the same no matter what.”

“So why is some salt better than others?” Kyle asked, brow wrinkled.

“Because of the value we ascribe to it, mainly. If it was the salt itself, you’d never get any ghosts out at sea, and you do, so.” Alex shrugged. “Anyway, the value you ascribe to certain things can make a huge difference. Are you religious at all?”

Kyle raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“You might’ve found God in the last decade, I don’t know.”

“Oh yeah, nowhere like a hospital for finding God.” Kyle shook his head. “Nah, I’m no more religious now than I was when we were kids. I go to church occasionally with family, but that’s it.”

“Any superstitions you could exploit?” Alex asked. “Lucky pants, little rituals you do before certain events, anything like that?”

“I mean…yeah, I guess.” Kyle frowned. “Sure, but I don’t think my pre-exam snack choices are gonna help with a…haunt, or whatever this is. Is it definitely not a curse?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re not being targeted,” Alex said dryly, and took a mental step back almost immediately. What if Kyle was being targeted? 

“Is there a way to find out?” Kyle asked. “I know you said it’s town-wide, and you’ve been getting stuff too, but seriously, I haven’t noticed anyone else feeling anything out of the ordinary. No one else is getting lost on their way to work.”

“You might have developed some sensitivity over the years. It’s not uncommon in people who work closer to actual death than the general public.”

Kyle narrowed his eyes, and Alex waited for him to call him on his bullshit. But Kyle bit the inside of his lip and then nodded, accepting it. 

It was very weird, the way Kyle kept taking him at his word. 

“With actual curses, there’s no sure-fire way of finding out,” Alex said, mind racing just a little bit. “But common sense is more helpful than most people think. The easiest way to curse someone is to use something of their physical body – has anyone had access to anything of yours like hair or nail clippings?”

Kyle shook his head slowly. “Not that recently.”

“How recently is recently?”

Kyle gave him an arch look. “About three months. I was in Albuquerque, and it was a hook-up, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t her.”

Ew. Alex gave himself a mental pat on the back for not showing his reaction on his face. “No roommates?”

“No. I guess hair isn’t exactly hard to steal though, right?”

“Harder than you’d think, for people with short hair. Has anyone had access to your apartment lately apart from you?”

“My mom has a spare key, but that’s it. And I think we can rule her out. And actually, I haven’t been there regularly for a couple of weeks – my building’s roof is being repaired, so I’ve been staying out at the cabin most nights. I was only at my apartment yesterday because I needed to do some laundry.” At Alex’s raised eyebrows, Kyle gave a sort of shrug. “You know I didn’t even notice it wasn’t included in my dad’s assets when he died? I didn’t know he’d left it to you till my mom told me you’d transferred it to her.”

Alex shrugged, uncomfortable for the first time. “What was I gonna do with a hunting cabin in a town I never want to live in again?”

“You never planned on coming back?” 

“Did you?” Alex asked incredulously. “Seriously, you’re a bigshot doctor now, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Moved back when my dad died,” Kyle said simply. “And Roswell’s got a decent hospital, especially considering the size of the town. You know how many hospitals are closing these days? Lack of staff and money are killing small town hospitals, and people who need medical attention will go without if their options are making do or paying for a four-hour ambulance ride to the nearest place that can treat them. It’s dangerous. And…not what you’re here to hear about, sorry.” He made a face and looked down at what had to be a cold burrito by now. 

Alex had never, ever expected Kyle Valenti to care about something like poor, rural Americans getting healthcare. Not even when they’d been kids had Kyle been particularly caring. “Okay,” he said, taken aback. “I get that.”

“Right.” Kyle cleared his throat. “Anyway, Roswell’s not so bad, really. It’s kinda nice, getting to know the town as an adult. You see a different side of it. And it’s not like shades work out of their vans all the time, right? You have to have a home base somewhere.”

“Yeah, but you’d have to pay me to have it in Roswell,” Alex snorted.

“What’s so bad about Roswell?” Kyle asked, sounding almost affronted, and Alex laughed.

“You mean apart from all the happy memories?”

“Not all the memories are bad,” Kyle protested, an edge of guilt in his expression. “I know I was a dick, but you had Liz and Maria too.”

“Mmm, yeah. Name me one other person who gave me the time of day,” Alex asked, falsely cheerful.

Kyle glared at him. “Rosa?”

Alex held up his hand and lifted three fingers. “If you can name two more, I’ll be impressed.”

The silence was damning. Kyle hesitated, and finally said, “Flint?”

Alex laughed again and put his hand down. “Add my dad to the list next, why don’t you? I never want to see any of my family again if I can help it, so forgive me if I avoid Roswell like the plague. Do you want help with protection measures or not?”

“No, I do,” Kyle said hurriedly. “Sorry, I got us off track. Salt, got it. What else?”

“Iron.” Alex lifted his hand again and showed Kyle the bracelet around his wrist. “And honestly, even if you aren’t religious, lighting a candle to a couple of saints can’t hurt.”

“Which ones?”

“Michael the Archangel is pretty standard for protection against curses and ‘evil spirits’. Saint Benedict’s a good one, and obviously you can’t go wrong with Mary.”

Kyle snorted. “That should be my abuela’s catchphrase.”

Alex refused to rise to the bait. He and Kyle weren’t going to suddenly become friends again just because he was helping him in a professional capacity. “There are some basic charms you can make yourself that you can keep on your person or put in your home. An iron nail above the doorframe is a classic for a reason. Wearing your clothes inside out can help.”

Kyle raised an eyebrow. “Sure.” Alex gave him a look and tapped the neck of his own shirt. Kyle blinked, and had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Oh.”

“Yeah. This isn’t a joke to me, it’s my job. You can take my advice or leave it, it’s up to you, but you’re the one who asked for it.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Kyle rubbed at the neck of his own shirt. “Um. Is there anything else? I know you can buy amulets and charms and stuff online, but I always figured that stuff was all bullshit.”

“A lot of it is. The best charms are ones you make yourself, tailored for yourself.” Alex shrugged. “Kids are the best at it.”

“Kids?”

“Yeah. A kid will pick up a random rock because it has a nice shape, and decide it has special qualities – boom, instant charm. The power of belief.” Alex waved a hand, wiggling his fingers a bit. “Or they’ll decide that a certain stuffed toy has the power to eat nightmares, and suddenly it will. It’s not a foolproof system, but it’s effective. People like to make movies about kids getting haunted, but statistically, you’re far more likely to experience negative haunting activity and its effects as an adult.”

“I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be reassuring or not,” Kyle muttered.

“Things have power because we give it to them,” Alex said slowly, spelling it out. “Because _we_ give it to them. The power is already there inside us – it’s just figuring out how to express it.”

“What if you don’t believe much in anything like that?” Kyle asked, sounding anxious. “Like, I haven’t believed in God since I was about five. I’m not a superstitious guy.”

“Then you’ll have a harder time of it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.” Alex sighed. “Look, let me show you how to make a few charms; the kind of stuff you can do yourself.”

“Okay. Thanks, man.”

Alex bit back a brush-off and just nodded, getting his phone out. “I’ll text you a couple of links. And instructions on warding your home.”

“Warding?”

“Yeah.” Alex raised an eyebrow at him. “Guarding? Protecting?”

“I know what it means,” Kyle snapped. “I just…I don’t know, I thought that had to be done by a professional.”

“Like a shade?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah. A shade might make the process faster, but like…if you were actually my client, I’d go to your home and help you pick out some wards, help you cleanse your space, and set them up _with_ you, not for you. It’s guidance, more than anything else.”

“Oh. Okay.” Kyle looked down at his burrito and set it aside with a sigh, obviously giving up on it. “Okay, I know this is kind of a big ask, but I have the day off and…and I’ll pay you, whatever your going rate is, or…I don’t know, I just –”

“You want me to help you set up some wards?” Alex was already calculating the advantages and disadvantages, thinking through the options, considering his approach.

“If you have the time, or…I don’t know. Yeah.” Kyle swallowed and rubbed his eyes again. “Yeah. The cabin’s kinda…well, you know where it is, it’s a ways out from town.”

“Yeah.” Alex blinked, not showing the sudden confusion that was cutting through his resigned annoyance. The cabin was miles beyond the town limits, way beyond where the haunt should have been affecting Kyle at night. “You feel just as haunted out there as in town?”

“Yeah. And it’s worse at night. I’ve kinda been thinking about crashing on my mom’s couch,” Kyle admitted.

“What about her guest room?” Alex frowned. He’d stayed over Kyle’s house plenty of times as a kid, and he knew they had one.

But Kyle looked down at the table and lifted a shoulder. “Mom had to sell the house, after my dad died. She’s got a one-bed apartment now. Hospital bills don’t get cheaper just because you’re a respected local figure.” His lip curled, but his voice stayed quiet. “Funerals aren’t cheap either. And she won’t let me help, says I’ve got debt enough of my own to worry about. Sorry, this isn’t…sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Alex looked away, back down the road they’d walked up, squinting against the sun and thinking. The shade they were sitting in felt like a trap, all of a sudden. There was a sickly, pale quality to the light beyond it, the sky both too bright and too dark at once, daylight darkness creeping in. “I’ll come out to the cabin,” he decided, looking back at Kyle. “But I need to check in with Michael first.” It was a calculated statement, and he took in every flicker of surprise that crossed Kyle’s face.

“Michael Guerin? You’re working with him?”

“Yeah, I’m borrowing his truck while I’m in town.”

“You can ride with me if he doesn’t want you using his gas,” Kyle offered, and Alex shook his head and stood up.

“You should eat that,” he said, nodding at Kyle’s abandoned burrito. “Or eat something, at least.”

Kyle looked at it like he’d only just noticed it was there. “I thought…” He trailed off and stood up as well. “They’re no good cold,” he muttered, grabbing it and Alex’s wrapper and walking over to the trashcan nearby.

Alex wanted to tell him to make sure he was actually eating. It was what he would have done for a normal client. But however much he’d appeared to change, he still saw Kyle’s younger, smugger self in the edges of his body. It was hard to shake off how much he’d despised him, so he said nothing and started walking back to the Burrito Factory.

When he called Michael, he picked up before the first ring had even finished. “Alex?”

“Hey. I’m gonna go set up some wards at Kyle’s place – he’s been feeling haunted there as much as in town. He’s living outside town limits right now, in a hunting cabin his dad used to own.” Alex waited, and wasn’t disappointed.

“How far outside we talking?”

“About forty miles or so.”

“Forty miles?” Michael sounded as bewildered as Alex had felt when Kyle had told him. “Are you sure? I mean, is he sure?”

“Yes. So I’m gonna drive out there with him.”

“Okay?”

“Thoughts?”

“You want my opinion?” How the hell Michael sounded even more confused was beyond him. Alex paused, listening for footsteps, and heard Kyle’s a fair distance behind him, so he just lowered his voice.

“Yeah, Guerin. Mainly, do you think you should come too?”

“You wanted me to keep my distance,” Michael said cautiously, and Alex rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, but you’re also sensitive in a different way to me – you might see something I can’t, and vice versa. It sounds like this is an exception to the town limit rule, and I wanna know why.”

Michael’s breath caught. “Could they be there? Max and Isobel?”

“At the cabin? No, it’s tiny. But nearby, maybe? I don’t know, but it might be worth checking out. Kyle’s had similar nightmares to mine, and he still thinks he’s being targeted, and I don’t know, maybe he is.”

“Why the hell would a haunt target Kyle Valenti?”

Alex lowered his voice further. “Did your siblings ever interact with him at all?”

“Max didn’t like him, but that just means he had eyes. It wasn’t a huge deal or anything Valenti even knew about, probably.”

“Mmm. Do you wanna come?”

“Yeah. We can talk properly on the way, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll come get you now, send Kyle on ahead. See you in a bit.”

“Alright.”

Alex hung up and slid his phone back into his pocket, looking over his shoulder. Kyle had obviously been dawdling to give him some privacy, and he sped up to draw level with him once he saw Alex was done. “Guerin gonna come too?”

“Yeah. You go ahead, we’ll meet you there.”

“Okay.”

It was a relief to climb into Michael’s truck and start driving back to him. Back to the junkyard, Alex corrected himself with a secret flush of embarrassment. Whatever he and Michael were doing, it wasn’t…well. It was serious, he could admit that much to himself, or serious for him at any rate, but it wasn’t something he could think about just yet.

The sky was still too bright, the clouds all clustered in odd shapes like they couldn’t decide what they were doing. Huge wispy columns towered northwards, and Alex turned the truck to face away from them, heading out to the clearer skies south of the town centre. Long, flat clouds he’d always thought looked like flying saucers hung motionless over the horizon, an odd, ominous air to them he didn’t like. 

Aliens, aliens. Roswell and the UFO. His great grandfather. Kyle Valenti. The government cover-up. The military presence.

It all felt muddled up in his head, like he had all the good pieces of the jigsaw but couldn’t figure out how they fit together, like he was trying to put them together by touch alone. The horizon burned bright, too bright, and Alex watched smokeless fire race across the desert. 

His and Kyle’s dreams – did they mean anything? Was it significant that Kyle was being pushed to feel guilty for things beyond his control? He was sure there were other things Kyle had been experiencing that he hadn’t mentioned. The man in the red baseball cap in the Burrito Factory, for instance. Kyle was feeling persecuted. Alex was feeling watched. 

He needed more data points. 

He pulled over before he reached the junkyard and called Maria.

“Hey.” She picked up quickly. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked, immediately on guard.

“Because you’re ghost hunting?” she said, like he was being an idiot. “And it’s kind of a risky business?”

“Oh. Yeah, I’m fine, I’m a professional.”

“So? Professional shades aren’t any more protected just because they have licences.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “I’m fine, don’t worry. I wanted to check on something with you though.”

“Shoot.”

“When you had your necklace off, did you feel any kind of influence pushing you in a certain direction?”

“What do you mean?”

Screw it. He didn’t have time to pussyfoot around the issue. “Did you feel watched or hunted at all?”

“Hm.” Maria paused, and Alex waited while she thought about it. “I don’t think so. I didn’t have it off for long though, really.”

“Did you feel any sort of influence at all?”

“Not that I noticed? Sorry, I can tell that isn’t the answer you were hoping for.”

“It might be – all data is useful. Would you be willing to not wear the necklace today? Just to see if you do start feeling anything?”

Maria was quiet, and Alex listened to the quiet sound of her exhalation through the line. “Only while I’m in the Pony. That might screw with your data though; the Pony’s got protection charms literally in the foundations and walls.”

Alex shook his head, even though she couldn’t see. “That’s fine. I know it’s a big ask, considering what happened yesterday.”

“Mmm, yeah, we’re not talking about that.”

“Copy that.”

She snorted. “And I’m putting the necklace back on if I get freaked out.”

“Good. Keep me updated, okay? Oh! One more thing – was there a power outage last Thursday?”

“At the bar?”

“Yeah, wherever you were.”

“I’m always at the bar,” Maria muttered, and he could almost hear her frowning. “Thursday…maybe? Honestly, the power flickers from time to time anyway, so I don’t really notice it unless it goes out for more than a few seconds.”

“Okay. If you remember, let me know.”

“Will do. See you later.”

“Bye.”

Alex stared at the horizon as he put his phone away. The spaceship clouds looked like they’d expanded, and all he could think of was impending invasions and warzones. He shivered and lowered his gaze back to the road, putting Michael’s truck back in drive and heading out again. To keep himself distracted, he counted the haunts on the way.

Fire in the distance – one. The creepy clouds – two. A deer with invisible legs and half its skull blown off – three. A wave of anger so strong it had him clenching his fists on the steering wheel – four. Water bubbling up from a crack in the road – five. A hooded, bound body swinging from a noose tied to a billboard – six. A pack of ghostly hounds tearing at a strange, stuttering speed across the scrub, flickering in and out of existence – seven. A cry of pain Alex pinpointed as coming from under a tree, though it had sounded inside his head, as if whoever had made it was sitting right next to him – eight. The increasingly pervasive sense of doom and fear – nine. A veiled figure standing impossibly still at the side of the road – ten. The way the metal towers in the substation just beyond the next intersection looked too tall and too numerous, a thicket multiplying into a forest of twisted steel between glances – eleven.

Alex’s hands were freezing cold, and he was breathing too fast. He stopped counting and focused on the road, ignoring the haunts instead of noting them in case that helped.

It did, a little, but he was still tense and holding back shivers by the time he pulled into the junkyard. It felt all too much like that morning, keeping his walk controlled and steady as he approached the trailer, pretending his skin wasn’t crawling from the feeling of exposure. He knocked, though he hadn’t that morning, and Michael called, “Who is it?”

“The tooth fairy,” Alex called back, shifting his weight and not letting himself grimace at the way his stump and hip were beginning to ache, even though there was no one to see. It felt like someone was seeing, like they were recording, and he didn’t want his weaknesses caught. Something was stopping him from just walking in, from assuming he would be welcome.

“It’s open.”

Alex almost yanked the door open, then made himself grip the handle with more care and pull it slowly. He refused to look around before going inside. Better not to let on that he knew he was being watched.

No, fuck, he wasn’t being watched. He closed the door behind him and held onto the edge of the kitchen counter. Michael was hunched over the table, scowling at Alex’s laptop. He scrolled to the bottom of a page before making a noise of disgust and turning to look over his shoulder, mouth already open to make some disparaging comment. Whatever it was died, his eyes widening. “Uh –”

“Haze?” Alex asked, and gave him a wry smile.

“More like a fog.” Michael frowned and got up to take Alex’s hands in his own. They were hot, and Alex couldn’t quite stop his breath hitching as his sense of normality eased back through his body.

“Thanks.”

“You said it was getting worse.” Michael let go of Alex’s left hand and curled his other hand around Alex’s right as well, covering as much of his skin as possible. “You’re right.”

“Well I do like it when my theories are proved correct.” Alex looked down at their hands and swallowed. “We should get going. It’s a long drive from here to the Valenti cabin.”

“You should warm up first.”

“I’ll warm up in the truck.” Alex knew he should pull his hand free, but it was difficult when Michael was holding it so gently. “It’s only a haunt.”

Michael took a deep breath and let go of him slowly. “If you need to, just touch me, okay? Any exposed skin should work.”

“I thought you said it had to be intentional, when you do this?” Alex asked, jerking his head up. His hand felt even colder now he’d felt how warm Michael was. 

“I make it happen faster, but I think it happens on its own a bit too, and if you touch me, I’ll know what you’re after. You got the keys?”

“Oh, yeah.” Alex took them out of his pocket and handed them to Michael. “Thanks, for letting me use it.” He slipped past him to go and get his bag, with what supplies he might be able to use.

“No problem.”

“You wanna get lunch before we go?”

“Nah, I ate.” Michael gestured to a takeout box in the sink, emptied of its leftovers. “Let’s go, shade.” He squeezed Alex’s shoulder before opening the door, and Alex listed after him as he turned to follow. He paused after closing the door behind him, and listened. He heard the lock click, and smiled slightly to himself before following Michael to the truck. He did like his theories being proved correct.

“You always lock your doors telekinetically?” he asked as he climbed into the passenger seat and stretched out his legs. He would rather swallow hot coals than admit it, but his right leg ached after driving Michael’s truck.

“Most of the time, unless people’re looking.” Michael backed out of the junkyard with an ease borne of practice, barely having to check behind him as he reversed. 

“That why you kept this pickup so long?” Alex tapped the door, winding down the window a bit to let some air in. “What you lose in air conditioning you gain in being able to run it with your mind?”

Michael snorted and swung the truck onto the road. “Nah. I mean, that’s a bonus, sure, and I do like the way older stuff is easier to take apart and put back together, but I just like it.” He drummed his fingers on the wheel and tossed Alex a wry smile. “It was home for a while, after all.” He looked forward again. “Where am I going then?”

“North, out past Salt Creek.”

Michael nodded and headed south. “Easier to drive around than go through,” he explained before Alex could question it. 

Alex didn’t want to ask whether he meant easier because of traffic or because of the haunt. 

“Get me up to speed then,” Michael said, before the question fought its way out of Alex’s mouth regardless. “What’s up Valenti’s ass?”

Alex dug his phone out of his pocket and gave Michael a recap. He considered skipping the suicidal impulses part, then told himself that he wouldn’t have hidden that information if he and Michael were actually partners. The boundaries were getting blurred, and it wasn’t the right time to clear them.

It felt good, staying out of range of the worst of the haunt. Michael still reached over and closed his hand around Alex’s wrist for a moment once they were past Roswell’s northern limits, muttering something about Alex’s voice sounding strange before letting go.

Alex didn’t protest. 

“You used to come out to this cabin with Valenti?” Michael asked after Alex directed him off the main road.

“Yeah, and our dads.” The pillars of cloud Alex had seen earlier had flattened now, the sky a nearly uniform grey right across the horizon. 

“You ever get a haunted vibe from it before?”

“Never.” Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Jim Valenti left me the cabin when he died. Found out almost a year after it happened – took the lawyers that long to track me down, I guess. I gave it back to Kyle’s mom, and I guess it’s Kyle’s now, or he uses it at least.”

“You didn’t even want to come back and see it?”

“I never wanted to come back to Roswell ever again,” Alex said quietly. “Especially not for a shitty hunting cabin miles outside of town in the middle of nowhere. It’s not exactly accessible.”

Michael hummed in agreement. “He liked you a lot then, huh? Sheriff Valenti?”

“He liked me okay.” Alex stared out at the road, blinking slowly. “I figured he left it to me so I’d have somewhere to go if I did decide to move back. Somewhere that wasn’t my dad’s. As if I’m not a grown man who can afford a place of his own.”

“Hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Michael said dryly. “A roof’s a roof.”

“Charity’s charity, even if it’s dressed up as a gift in a dead man’s will.”

“So he liked you, but you hated his guts?” Michael was smiling, darkly amused, and Alex swallowed, old anger twisting in his chest.

“I didn’t hate him,” he said after a long moment that was stretching to the point of awkwardness. “I hated his hypocrisy.”

“How d’you mean?” It was a natural question, but Alex found he didn’t know how to answer. Michael tilted his head, not looking away from the road. “One system for him and his friends, another for everyone else?”

“Yeah.” Alex seized the answer tiredly. “Something like that.” How to explain that he could still remember with crystal clear clarity the exact cadence of Jim’s voice as he sighed and said, “Aw, son.” So sad whenever Alex accidentally showed something of his desire for his dad to not hate him. He’d sighed like that when he’d seen the way Alex was flinching from his dad, the summer he’d figured out Alex was gay. He’d sighed like that when he’d seen Alex limping, knowing without having to ask that it was because of a hit he’d been forced to take. He’d sighed when he’d seen Alex in eyeliner for the first time. He’d only ever fucking sighed, and done nothing useful to help. 

He’d tried to get his dad to lay off him. Alex knew that because he’d been told. His dad could throw out devastating revelations like they were nothing, his voice empty of emotion. Jim Valenti could stick his nose in as much as he liked, but they all knew he’d be singing a different tune if the sons were swapped. No one wanted a son like Alex. His mother certainly hadn’t.

Alex locked the memories down as hard as he could, before they could surface properly. “It’s tiny,” he said. “Shouldn’t take more than half an hour to ward. We should figure out what to tell Kyle about you.”

“What about me?”

“If we pull up and the whole area looks hazy to you, I want you to be able to tell me without Kyle figuring out there’s something different about you. What do you normally tell people?”

“That I can feel the bad vibes.” Michael grinned at him when Alex rolled his eyes. “Hey, it works! No one’s ever questioned it before. You got a better idea?”

“Not really.” Alex sighed. “Okay, you _feel the vibes,_ and we’ll see how haunted this cabin really is.”

“You’re absolutely sure this is related to the stuff in town?”

“He’s been staying there longer than a week,” Alex murmured. “But only started feeling the effects after your family went missing. I can’t find any reports of a power outage on Thursday, but I don’t think it’s crazy to assume that was a Max-related event.”

Michael nodded. “If he tried to fight back, maybe. Or maybe it was just a power outage.”

“Hell of a coincidence though.” Alex turned his phone over and over in his hand. “Hopefully we’ll find something useful at the cabin.”

“Other than nostalgia?”

“Useful,” Alex repeated, and Michael snorted. The silence they fell into was comfortable, and Alex wished that the road wasn’t so rough, so he could lean his head against the door without getting it bumped to hell. Still, he was warm, he wasn’t feeling haunted, and his leg had stopped aching. He almost didn’t want them to ever reach their destination.

They had to in the end, of course. He directed Michael down the dirt lane and they rolled slowly to a stop next to Kyle’s car. Michael turned off the engine and huffed a quiet laugh as he settled his hat on his head. “You were right. This place is fucked.”

Alex couldn’t see or feel anything yet, but relief swooped in his stomach. “How bad?”

“Really bad.” Michael sounded impressed. “Like, I can see why even insensitive asshole Kyle Valenti’s feeling it. It’s like a damn fog trap.” Kyle himself came out onto the porch, and Alex exchanged a look with Michael before they both got out of the truck, slamming the doors closed at the same time. Alex reached into the back to grab his bag and slung it over his shoulder, taking in the sight of the cabin for a moment. 

He’d always known it was small, but he couldn’t have actually been here since he was twelve or thirteen at the very latest, and he couldn’t believe how genuinely tiny it was. And ugly too, but he made himself look again at that thought. It was harder than he’d expected to figure out whether he disliked the look of it because of his own soured memories or because it was giving off an air of menace, but he cautiously settled on it being a mix of the two, with a leaning towards the latter.

The cabin was technically well-maintained. There wasn’t a shingle missing from the roof, there were no holes in the wooden walls, the porch was weathered but undamaged – it shouldn’t have been possible for such an objectively tidy building to look so neglected. Alex’s brain was giving him two different stories, and one of them was of a run-down, abandoned hovel that promised pain and danger to anyone who approached. It was a very strong story, and Alex sighed and tried to concentrate on the facts of what he could see, not what the haunt was making him feel.

“Hey.” Kyle lifted an awkward hand in greeting as they approached, Alex hiding his grimace as his leg started to ache again pretty much immediately and a prickly sense of dread crept down his spine

“There it is,” he muttered, rolling his shoulders and getting ahead of Michael to go up the steps. “Been waiting long?” he asked Kyle, who shook his head.

“Not long. Thanks for coming,” he added, glancing over Alex’s shoulder as Michael climbed the steps behind him. “Seriously, I really appreciate it.”

“Same,” Michael drawled. “Never felt such bad vibes from such a tiny building. It’s like you’ve got malice squared here. Promise this place isn’t on top of an Indian burial ground?” Alex turned his head to give him a deeply unimpressed look which Michael returned with an unrepentant shrug. “Doesn’t hurt to check.”

“You know those aren’t a thing,” Alex said, irritated.

“Fine, any burial ground? You’re sure this isn’t a dump site for every local murder for a hundred miles? Because it sure feels like it.” Michael cracked his neck, and Kyle scowled.

“Pretty sure my dad wasn’t burying people out here, yeah,” he said in a hard voice. It was better than his awkwardness at least, and Michael smiled unpleasantly.

“Standard question.”

“Is it?” Kyle raised his eyebrows, scorn in every line of his expression, and Alex rolled his eyes.

“You gonna let us in or not?” 

“Sure.” Kyle shook his head like he was clearing it and opened the door, going in ahead of them.

It looked almost identical to Alex’s memories of it, right down to the ugly red curtains and the deer head mounted next to the stone fireplace. He and Kyle had played rock-paper-scissors to pick who got to sleep on the sofa and who would be on the uncomfortable fold-out chair bed. That was gone now, Alex noticed as he swung his bag down onto the coffee table, and the books on the shelves looked slightly different. There was a small TV tucked against the wall to the right of the kitchen, and there was a fruit bowl on the kitchen table. With fruit in it.

Alex wondered for a second if that was the source of the strange smell. Sweet but disgusting at the same time, like something rotting. Then he saw that the fruit in the bowl was perfectly intact, and inhaled again, deeper. Smell was the sense he had the hardest time with when it came to distinguishing between reality and a haunt.

Michael’s mouth was twisted like he could smell something bad too, but when Alex raised an eyebrow at him he just shook his head.

“My mom never comes out here,” Kyle was saying, and Alex noted in a detached way that he sounded like he was speaking from a long way away, through a tunnel or something. Faded and echoing. “The TV’s from my apartment, but I haven’t really been using it much. Power’s not great out here anyway, and it just makes it feel even more isolated, somehow.”

“Shut up for a second, Valenti,” Michael said, and he sounded distant too. The fear that if Alex turned and lost sight of either of them they would vanish completely was sudden and strong, and Alex breathed through it even as his heart rate started to climb.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “How the hell are you sleeping in here?”

“Is it bad?” Kyle’s voice came into focus when Alex looked at him, which was a relief.

“Bad is such an understatement.” Michael made a face. “If ghosts were rats, I’d be telling you to burn the place down. Which is actually an underrated solution to haunted houses,” he added, raising his eyebrows at Kyle, who scowled.

“We’re not burning down my dad’s cabin.”

“He’s not serious, Kyle,” Alex muttered, closing his eyes to see if that helped the weird lightheaded feeling he was getting.

“Aren’t I?” Michael snorted. Then – “Hey, Alex.”

“Mm?” Alex opened his eyes and shifted his weight against a wave of something like dizziness. He felt unsteady on his prosthesis all of a sudden, unable to find his balance. “Shit.” He lifted his arms instinctively, and Michael grabbed one. He steadied immediately and took a deep breath, Michael’s touch clearing away the fog of the haunt even through the layers of clothing between their skin. 

“You okay?” Michael asked, brow pinched, and Alex nodded.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He pulled his arm back and grimaced. “We should get started.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Kyle sounded genuinely concerned. “You look like you’re about to throw up.”

“It’s just the haunt.” Alex waved a hand. “I’ll be fine.”

“Different sensitivity levels in action,” Michael said casually, playing along and pointing to Kyle, himself, and then Alex. “Weak, medium, strong.”

“I didn’t realise it’d hit you so hard,” Kyle said quietly, and Alex shook his head.

“No one knows for sure until it happens, that’s just the nature of the unknown. Come on, let’s do this. Open the windows, get some air in here. Tell me you got rid of those twin beds?”

Kyle snorted and led the way back through the kitchen to the tiny bedroom as Michael started shoving the windows open. “Yeah, first thing we did, pretty much. Those beds had to be a hundred years old.”

The bedroom looked even smaller with a double instead of the twins. The hunting trophies had been taken down in here at least, though not replaced with anything else, and there was a plain chest of drawers in the corner opposite the door that hadn’t been there before. “Windows,” Alex instructed, holding onto the doorframe. “Can you smell anything?”

Kyle frowned at him over his shoulder as he went to open the window at the end of the bed. “No? Does it smell in here?”

“It isn’t a real smell, if that helps. Haunts can affect all your senses, smell included.”

“So you can smell something?”

“Mm. Kinda like…” Alex paused and inhaled, frowning. “Like meat going off.”

“Like a dead body?” Kyle turned to face him, eyes wide, and Alex shook his head.

“Smells can be symbolic too, don’t freak out.”

“Oh sure.” Kyle shivered as a breeze made the curtains flutter behind him. “I’m totally calm.”

Alex saw the glass explode inwards silently and watched, frozen, as non-existent shards of glass buried themselves in Kyle’s body, a long fragment slicing his cheek right open. He closed his eyes and opened them, and everything was fine again. Kyle had stepped forward so the bed was no longer between them, lips parted. “Dude, are you –”

“No,” Alex cut him off and rolled his eyes, refusing to show anything but professional disdain. “I’m being haunted, stop asking if I’m okay. I’m not, neither are you, and neither is Guerin while we’re in this cabin.”

“Someone mention me?” Michael popped his head round the corner.

“No,” Alex said, and made himself let go of the doorframe. “Okay, all the windows are open? We’re picking wards.” He jerked his chin at the final window, and Kyle opened it obediently.

“How many?” Michael looked past Alex and narrowed his eyes. “That’s, what, eight windows? One door, and a chimney?”

“Nine windows,” Alex corrected. “There’s a little one in the bathroom. And there are two windows, a door, and another chimney in the shed too.”

“Jesus. Doesn’t it get cold?”

“Yes,” Alex and Kyle said at the same time, and Alex frowned, going into the bathroom to open the window there. Jim had always joked that it was the perfect size, because you could do everything you needed without having to take more than a step in any direction. The tub was an ugly, half-sized thing Alex had hated using as a kid, the sink and toilet crammed into a space so small that Alex had to kneel on the toilet seat to open the window.

“You need a ward for every threshold,” Michael explained to Kyle. “So, every window and door, and one for the chimney. Plenty of people forget a chimney and regret it.”

“What sort of thing should I be using?” Kyle asked, bewildered.

“I’m a fan of Christmas decorations, myself,” Michael drawled. “But people use whatever they like. Knew a lady who did an origami animal for each one, another who used dead lightbulbs. Usually you want something you can hang from a string. People use dried flowers or herbs pretty often too.”

“I don’t have anything like that,” Kyle said, worried. Alex backed out of the bathroom carefully, ignoring the vision of cockroaches and worms squirming and scuttling out of the plugholes.

“Use the fridge magnets,” he said, going back into the kitchen. “You have plenty of those.”

“Will that work?” Kyle and Michael followed him, all three of them looking at the magnet collection Jim had amassed over the years. There were touristy ones from places he’d visited, bottlecap ones Kyle had made at school, weird novelty ones shaped like various food items – all sorts.

“Magnets are actually a good idea,” Michael said, his voice faded like before. Alex didn’t want to turn around to look at him, didn’t want to turn around and find himself suddenly alone. He counted the magnets instead, in English and Spanish, trying to distract himself from the way sweat was beginning to prickle under his arms. “Think of them attracting all the bad shit to them and neutralising it – that’s the function of wards anyway, and magnets are already good at attracting stuff. It’s an association sorta thing. Alex.”

His hand fell lightly on Alex’s shoulder, and he could breathe again. “Yeah,” he said, not acknowledging it. “Exactly. Pick some magnets, Kyle. Whichever ones you think look the most protective.”

“Protective?” Kyle said hesitantly, coming up to stand next to him.

“Yeah. Like…this one.” Alex pointed to one shaped like a red apple. “An apple a day, right? And this.” He pointed to what had been his favourite magnet as a child, an iridescent metal feather. “Feathers can be used as good luck charms.”

“You should pick them,” Kyle muttered. “You’re better at this than me.”

“It’s your house, Kyle,” Alex said, exasperated. “Pick your own wards. You might have different associations to me, and like Guerin said, association is kind of the name of the game. You do that, I’ll make a salt spray, Guerin can check the outhouse.”

Michael squeezed his shoulder, and went to do just that. Alex inhaled a deep breath that smelled of rotting meat and went to get the tub of salt from his bag before filling the kettle and setting it on the stove to boil.

“Didn’t even know you knew Guerin,” Kyle muttered, frowning at the fridge.

“All shades know each other,” Alex said sarcastically. “There’s like a secret network.”

“Do you think a fish is protective?”

“It’s not about whether I think it is, it’s whether you think it is,” Alex told him, leaning against the sink and then flinching away when a huge, brown spider crawled up from the plughole. He could tell it wasn’t real, but that didn’t help. It flickered and faded, and an identical spider started crawling out of the plughole again. It was possibly messed up that it was a relief to realise it was just a remnant on loop, but all shades had a favourite kind of haunt.

Michael probably didn’t, Alex realised. They all looked exactly the same to him. Remnant, revenant, or poltergeist, they were all just frequencies on a wavelength only visible to Michael.

The spider kept climbing out of the plughole and vanishing, and Alex noted with a drowned sense of alarm the way that his vision was going blurry at the edges. It took far more effort than it should have done for him to close his eyes and straighten his spine, pressing his stump down into the socket to feel the ache burn. It centred him, and he made himself look over at Kyle before he could get too scared to.

Kyle had a handful of magnets and was holding another with a frown of consideration. Alex cleared his throat. “When would you say the last time this place was cleaned?”

Kyle twisted to give him an offended look. “I clean!”

“Deep cleaned,” Alex said flatly. “Like, pulling out all the furniture and scrubbing the whole place down from ceiling to floorboards?”

“Oh. Um. Probably never, to be honest. There’s still cobwebs in the outhouse I’m pretty sure I recognise from when we were kids.”

“Right. Well, I’m not helping you do that, but it wouldn’t hurt if you did that at some point in the near future.” Alex looked around, holding onto the back of one of the kitchen chairs in case he got lightheaded again. “Corners are good to get into if we can though. If we can pull the furniture out a bit and lay some salt along the edges, that might help.”

“Might?”

“Honestly?” Alex had to force himself to look at him, and it was an unpleasant sort of surprise to see Kyle look completely normal when part of him wasn’t expecting him to have a face at all, or to look like Mimi had yesterday morning. “It’s so bad in here it feels like pissing on a bonfire. I’m kind of amazed you’re still standing after spending a week living here.”

Kyle shrugged. “Lack of sensitivity counts for something, huh? Just like your dad always said.”

“He was more sensitive than he let on,” Alex said. “How do you think he knew what would mess with me the most?”

“What do you mean?” Kyle’s frown was like sandpaper on an open wound, and Alex bit back a snarl, hand tightening on the chair.

The door opened, and Michael swaggered back in, sweeping his hat off. “Your shed is a mess, Valenti. You ever heard of a broom?”

“I never really use anything in there. I’m not much of a hunter.”

“Wouldn’t’ve guessed,” Michael smirked, and Alex felt a twinge of disgust.

It was so out of the blue that he recoiled from it, reaching up to touch his own chest. Michael saw and frowned, and Alex shook his head quickly. “You picked enough magnets yet?” he asked Kyle.

“I’ve got eight. Do you want me to pick enough for the outhouse too?” 

“Don’t bother.” Michael shook his head, looking around with narrowed eyes. “We’ll block off the door for now and you can just stay out of there. Can’t even get to one of those windows with all that junk in the way, and that chimney’s a lost cause. Tidy house, tidy mind, Valenti.”

“Don’t you live in a trailer?” Kyle asked, cutting, and Michael’s laugh was sharp.

“Yeah, and I keep it in good shape.”

Kyle opened his mouth to reply and Alex said, “Don’t.” The kettle hissed in the quiet after he spoke, and he took a deep breath. “It’s the haunt. Focus on the job, don’t get sidetracked by high school bullshit.”

Kyle put the magnets he’d chosen on the kitchen table and turned his hands over, studying them. “How can you tell?” he asked quietly. “What’s you, and what’s the haunt?”

“Like I told you earlier, you have to know your own mind.” Alex flexed his hand on the chair and looked at Michael, whose mouth twisted in a self-deprecating smile. His mind wasn’t being affected, they both knew, so he was being a shit on purpose. Alex touched his chest again and frowned. “Try to think, if you weren’t feeling so run down, and if we were anywhere else but this cabin, would you be acting the way you are and saying the things you’re saying? It takes practice,” he added. “And it’s always harder if you’re mixed up in it. That’s why shades generally take jobs outside of their home area.”

Kyle nodded, still looking at his hands. “Okay. Thanks.”

“We’re here to help,” Michael said dryly, and gave Alex an innocent look when he glared at him. 

“I know.” Kyle looked at him, and Alex stared at the determined edge to his expression. “I’m sorry.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “Okay. Um.”

“For when we were kids too,” Kyle added, and Michael’s eyebrows climbed higher. “I know I was kind of an asshole to you then – I was kind of an asshole to everyone, so. I’m sorry for that too.”

“Jesus, Valenti, don’t spill all your guts.” Michael’s expression didn’t match his tone at all, snark pairing badly with his wide eyes. “Leave some for setting wards.”

“Right.” Kyle’s mouth twitched, and he looked down at the magnets again. “Yeah. What should I be doing with these?”

The kettle whistled, and Alex got a pot out to pour the boiling water into, putting it on the still-burning stove ring. “Pass me the salt, one of you,” he said. “And get a bowl big enough for all those magnets.”

Michael appeared at his side, salt tub in hand, and the way he pressed his shoulder to Alex’s wasn’t accidental at all. Alex breathed out, settling more comfortably in his skin even as his awareness of where Kyle was jumped up to fill the gap. Old instincts, part of him baring teeth and setting up a guard against a potential attack for showing any sign of affection for another man.

But Kyle was just getting a large bowl out of a cupboard and scooping the magnets into it. Alex breathed out and took the salt from Michael to pour a generous measure into the water before turning to pass it to Kyle. “Fill the bowl with it, bury the magnets.”

“To purify them?” Kyle guessed, taking the tub and doing as he was told. 

“Exactly.” Alex took a metal spoon from the utensils pot and stirred the simmering water, the dissolving salt shimmering under the surface. Michael kept their shoulders pressed together, and Alex let himself press back, just for a second, hoping Michael would understand it as the gratitude it was. It annoyed him to have to rely on Michael so heavily to keep his head clear, but he didn’t want to make a big deal of it.

“What now?” Kyle asked.

“In my bag, there’s a metal spray can,” Alex said without looking around. “Go get it?” 

“Gotcha.”

Michael caught his eye and raised his eyebrows, amusement and surprise in the turn of his mouth. Alex smirked in response and ducked his head to hide it. Kyle’s obedience was kind of funny, now the weirdness of it was wearing off. Neither of them would have asked him for so much as a pencil back in high school. It was safer to just stay off his radar as much as possible.

Kyle came up on his other side with the can, and Alex nodded. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a funnel? Or a jug?”

“There’s a funnel in the outhouse I just saw,” Michael offered. “Looks like it’s got about twenty layers of dust on it, but we could wash it off?”

“Let me check if there’s a jug first,” Kyle said, going to rifle through the cupboard. “Uh…there’s this one?” He held up a milk jug, and Alex shook his head.

“Boiling water might crack it. Can one of you get the funnel and wash it off?”

Kyle headed for the door before Michael could even move, and he huffed a laugh once he’d gone outside. “Damn. He must have a serious guilt complex.”

“I think the haunt is amplifying it,” Alex said, remembering what Kyle had told him that morning. “The blame aspect.”

“Can’t say I’m too broken up about it.” Alex nudged his shoulder gently in reproach and Michael snorted. “Come on, you’re not crying about it either.”

“Yeah, but even Kyle Valenti doesn’t deserve to feel suicidal,” Alex said dryly. He glanced over his shoulder and frowned at Michael, lowering his voice. “What does it look like in here to you?”

“Fog city, like I said. It’s so hazy I’d be blind if it was really visual.”

“I thought it was?”

“Yeah, but like…I don’t know, it’s like night vision or something, or seeing radio waves. It doesn’t obscure what my eyes can already see.”

Alex nodded slowly. “Okay. Are there any particularly strong patches? Anything that might be a nexus?”

“Not really. It’s all a mess in here, it’s bad.”

“How would you clear it, if you could do it your way?”

Michael exhaled and shook his head. “Blast away at it like dynamite in a quarry. It’d take hours though, there’s layers and layers of shit in here, and it’s sticky too, like it’s set up shop and don’t wanna move.”

Alex wished he could see it as Michael saw it, just to get an idea of how it worked for him. They had to stop talking when Kyle came back in, holding a medium sized funnel covered in dirt and dust. He was holding it gingerly, but put it in the sink and started washing it without complaint.

“We should start pulling the furniture out a bit,” Alex said, giving the saltwater one last stir and turning off the stove. 

“You want me to pour that into the can when the funnel’s clean?” Kyle asked, nodding at it.

“Not on your own,” Alex said. “The funnel’s too big, someone else needs to hold it. No point in spilling everything.”

“Alright.”

Alex felt the haunt hit him the second Michael stopped touching him, but he was ready for it. He and Michael pulled the furniture in the living room into the middle as much as they could, and Alex started sprinkling salt along the lines of the walls. The smell of rotting meat was back, stronger than ever, and he had to steady himself on Michael’s shoulder for a second after they shoved the couch back into place.

“Funnel’s clean,” Kyle called, and they both went back into the kitchen. Alex used the oven gloves to hold the funnel, Kyle held the can, and Michael poured the water in a smooth, steady stream until the can was full.

Alex made Kyle do the spritzing, since it was his cabin. “Every wall,” he said. “Every corner, and every threshold, and don’t forget the ceiling and floor.”

“Got it.” It took Kyle a second to figure out how to hold the can without burning his fingers on the hot metal, but he was efficient once he had. He moved through the cabin quickly, and Alex caught Michael’s eye and tilted his head at the surprised expression on his face.

“It’s working,” Michael said under his breath, as Kyle went into the bedroom. “Like, it’s not dispelling it completely, but it’s definitely calming down.”

“Thank fuck for that,” Alex muttered. “I still feel like shit.”

“Too sensitive,” Michael teased, and it gave Alex a horrible feeling of whiplash when heat pooled in his belly at Michael’s tone simultaneously with a shiver of disgust running under his skin. He knew Michael could feel it when he flinched away, but there wasn’t time to explain before Kyle came back in.

“Now what? The magnets?”

“Yeah,” Alex nodded, but Michael frowned and stepped away from him, turning in a slow circle. 

“Did I miss a spot?” Kyle asked, raising an eyebrow, and Michael tilted his head and walked into the living room.

“Maybe? Does this place have a basement or something?”

“A basement?” Kyle snorted and looked at Alex. “Nah, it’s a hunting cabin. Foundations probably don’t go deeper than a few feet.”

But Michael was frowning at the floor, turning in another circle. “Well there’s something under here.”

“Under the…whatever this is?” Kyle jiggled the spray can, and Michael nodded without looking at him. “You wanna check under the porch or something?”

“Yeah. Before we put those wards up. I’ve got a flashlight in my truck, won’t take a minute.”

“Hey, take this.” Kyle grabbed a chunky flashlight from a shelf in the kitchen and passed it to Michael, who nodded and left the door open when he went outside. Kyle looked at Alex. “Can you feel anything?”

“Too much,” Alex said. “Guerin’s got a better directional sense of it than I do – there’s so much in here I can’t pinpoint any sort of nexus for any of it.”

“What’s it like?” Kyle leaned against the divider wall between the kitchen and living room. “Feeling that stuff all the time?”

“I don’t feel it all the time.” Alex shrugged and leaned back against the countertop, shifting his weight off his stump. “I just get it stronger than most people when something is there.”

“Sounds like a bum deal, if you ask me.”

Alex shrugged again, unconcerned. “Means I can see what to fix when there’s a problem there. And not all ghosts are malicious.”

“No?”

Alex scoffed. “No. It’s like people – it’s the loud, angry ones that make the most noise. Most haunts are so tiny and benign people don’t even notice them. You only call in a shade if there’s a problem.”

Kyle nodded, clearly filing that away, and they both looked around as Michael came back in, frowning harder than ever. “Foundations are concrete,” he said shortly. “Solid all the way round, from what I can see. You oughta clear out under your porch,” he added. “You’re gonna get snakes in there if you’re not careful. And you shouldn’t stack your wood against the wall either – you’ll get spiders.”

“Are you…giving me health and safety advice on my cabin?” Kyle asked, looking torn between amusement and disbelief.

“Don’t get all mushy about it.” Michael shoved the flashlight back into Kyle’s hands and went to kick the rug in front of the fireplace out of the way.

“What’re you doing?” Kyle stepped forward, and Michael held up a hand to keep him at a distance. 

“Checking something. You ever move this table?” He kicked it gently.

“Not really, it’s pretty heavy.”

“Help me shift it.”

“Okay?” Kyle set the flashlight down on a chair, and Alex came around to the other side of the kitchen table to watch as he and Michael bent down and lifted the table to one side.

“Holy shit.” Alex grabbed onto the dividing wall and stared at the hatch in the floor. “Did you know this was here?”

“You think I would’ve kept it quiet if I knew?” Kyle staggered backwards. “Shit. What the hell even is that?”

“Fallout shelter, probably.” Michael knelt down and reached for the handles, and Alex started forward without thinking.

“Whoa, Guerin –”

“Maybe it is full of bodies.” Michael grinned up at him and twisted the handles. “Wanna see?”

Kyle was ashen, and Alex scowled. “That isn’t funny.”

“It’s a little funny, if you’re a morbid asshole like me.” Michael wrenched the hatch open, the hinges groaning and squealing in protest, and despite himself Alex leaned forward to look as a dark, rectangular hole was revealed, the very top of a rusted ladder just visible. “There’s light down there!” Michael exclaimed, peering down. “You have any switches in this place you’ve never known the use for?”

“No,” Kyle muttered, leaning forward too. “Jesus. What the actual fuck?”

“Love me a secret bunker.” Michael gave Alex a smirk over his shoulder. “Who wants to go down first?”

“Sounds like you do,” Alex snorted, hiding how shaken he was. “You couldn’t look more like a kid at Christmas right now, you know.”

“Easy pleasures make for a happier life,” Michael said easily, twisting around and kneeling on the floor, extending one leg backwards into the hole.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t call someone?” Kyle asked, glancing at Alex in alarm. “Like the cops or something?”

“Ah, grow a pair, Valenti.” Michael started climbing down. “No need to call the cops unless we actually find something. I don’t _actually_ think there’ll be bodies down here.”

“That’s reassuring,” Kyle muttered, shuffling forwards to look as Michael descended further down the shaft. “How deep is it?”

“I’ll let you know when I hit the bottom,” Michael said sarcastically. Alex and Kyle watched as his head dropped further and further away, until it finally stopped. It turned and vanished, and Alex jerked forward without meaning to.

“Guerin?”

“Okay…” Michael sounded much further away than he should have done, and Alex stepped back again, suddenly worried he would lose his footing and fall through the hatch. “On the plus side…there don’t seem to be any bodies.”

“What is it?” Kyle called.

“I think you’d better come and see.”

“After you,” Alex said, nodding to him, and Kyle swallowed before kneeling down to reverse backwards down the ladder like Michael had. Alex watched him descend and went down on his own knees slowly, eyeing the hatch lid speculatively. If a ghost flipped it on them, they could push it up. If it locked the handles, Michael would be able to unlock them. Rationally, it would be completely fine for them to all be underground in the secret bunker at the same time.

Alex shook his head and reached over to grab his bag, rummaging around in it to find the little brass bell he’d been issued when he’d gotten his licence. It had a muffler to stop it sounding constantly, and he slid that off and set the bell on top of the hatch lid. 

Even something as strong as a poltergeist would probably struggle to lift something as heavy as that, and if it started to shake, they would hear the bell and know it was happening.

“You coming, Alex?” Kyle had obviously reached the bottom, and a second later Alex heard him say, “Oh God. I think I would’ve preferred bodies.”

Alex had to count to ten before he could make himself lower even a foot into the hole. His claustrophobia had never extended to man-made structures like basements before, and he’d been mostly fine in Michael’s bunker, but this felt different. 

“Alex?” Michael called up, and Alex’s foot found purchase on a rung.

“Coming,” he said, voice steady, and started to climb down very, very slowly.

He noted his reactions as they occurred, trying to distance himself from the fear as it rose. Heart rate increasing, breathing getting shaky, palms starting to sweat – dangerous on a ladder. He’d climbed ladders with his prosthesis before, but this time was like the first time all over again. Worse, it was like learning to use it in the first place had been. He could feel the roundness of the rungs under his left foot. He could make sure he was planting the sole of his boot right in the middle, so the rung braced the arch of his foot instead of the toe or heel.

He couldn’t do that with the prosthesis. He could only feel his stump in the socket, and it felt swollen and painful. He dragged his prosthetic foot along each rung as he reached them, leaning his weight on it only a little at a time in case he’d messed up the placement by mistake. And with every step down, the floor rose around him like water. 

He wouldn’t be able to breathe underground. It was a fact, irrefutable. He stopped at chin-level with the floorboards, holding onto the ladder so tightly his hands shook, his breaths coming in quiet pants.

“Alex?” Michael sounded so far away, like he was at the end of a long, long tunnel. Alex couldn’t see him, couldn’t see Kyle, could only see the cabin around him from an unfamiliar angle. He could see the salt he’d sprinkled on the floor. Could see the dust under the couch and chairs.

“I’m coming,” he made himself say, forcing the words out, and squeezed his eyes shut as he took a deep breath and lowered himself below the level of the floor. It was like there was a band tightening around his chest as he did – he could hear his heart in his ears, and it took forever for his left foot to find purchase on the rung further down.

He didn’t want to breathe out or open his eyes, so he made himself do both at the same time.

The concrete wall of the shaft was right in front of him, the ladder in front of that. His arms trembled as he lowered his body down another rung, kicking the wall with the toe of his prosthetic foot and then easing it backwards, shifting his weight onto it carefully until he was sure he’d positioned it safely.

Slowly, slowly, one rung at a time. He couldn’t hear or see Michael or Kyle, but he knew they were there, and he counted his breaths as best he could so they wouldn’t think he was panicking. In, hold, and out. Bad enough that they were going to think he was going at such a glacial pace because of his leg. 

The ladder went down further than the shaft itself, widening into the bunker proper. The second his head was free of the narrow shaft, Alex twisted it to look behind him. Michael was standing close by, looking up at him – Alex was still a good foot and a half off the ground – and beyond him was Kyle, staring at the tableau before him.

Alex opened his mouth but couldn’t think of a single thing to say. _Nothing says romance like an underground concrete box_ was his first response, but that definitely wouldn’t have been appropriate. He remembered Mimi telling him just yesterday morning that Jim Valenti cheated on his wife, and he’d dismissed it, but he really couldn’t imagine Jim bringing his wife out here for a romantic getaway.

The double bed had a pink bedspread. The lampshades were all red. There were matching bedside tables and a wardrobe and a mirrorless vanity table. An armchair, and a chest at the foot of the bed, as if Jim had tried to make it homey. It painted a pretty ugly dimension of Jim Valenti that Alex had never seen, and doubted Kyle had known about.

Michael held up one hand to get Alex’s attention and reached towards his good leg with a questioning lift to his eyebrows. Alex nodded, and Michael pressed his hand briefly to Alex’s ankle. Almost immediately, he relaxed. It was just a ladder, just a bunker, just a cabin. He let out a long breath and climbed down the last few rungs much easier, able to lean back and actually see where he was placing his prosthetic foot now. It was still a relief to stand on the floor, and Michael squeezed his shoulder before they both stepped forward to join Kyle.

“My dad wouldn’t bring the women he was seeing out here,” he said, so quietly Alex almost missed it.

“The women he was seeing?” Alex repeated, raising an eyebrow.

“My dad…” Kyle blinked a couple of times, eyes still fixed on the bed, perfectly made. “He had affairs. At least two, maybe more. I heard him and my mom fighting about it when I was a kid. But he wouldn’t…if you were seeing another woman, why would you bring them all the way out here and then down _here?_”

They both looked around as Michael yanked open the doors of the wardrobe. “Maybe he wasn’t screwing them,” he said, taking out a plastic bag and turning around with a strange look on his face. “You’re a doctor, what the hell is this?”

Kyle frowned and stepped forward to take it from him, then looked at the rest of the contents of the wardrobe. “This is for detoxing.”

“From anything in particular?” Alex asked, coming forward as well. The darkness down here seemed too strong for the weak light from the lamps. 

“Looks like a mix.” Kyle put the bag back and ran his fingers over a few boxes on one of the shelves. “Could be applicable for a few things.”

“Was your dad an addict?” Michael looked at him, and at Kyle’s narrowed eyes he lifted his hands. “Hey, no judgement, I’ve never met an unhealthy coping mechanism I didn’t like.”

Kyle frowned and looked back at the wardrobe. “Not that I knew of. But…”

“He always had a flask on him,” Alex said quietly, and Kyle looked at him over his shoulder with a terrible sort of agreement in his eyes. “But if he was an alcoholic, he was a highly functional one. And I don’t know why he’d build himself a romance-themed detox bunker if he was planning on locking himself down here and getting clean. Seems more likely he’d be doing it for someone else.”

Kyle shook his head and went to look at the stuff on the vanity, his fingers coming away dusty when they brushed along the surface. “Do you think maybe someone died here?”

“Nah.” Michael’s certainty was a relief to hear. He knelt down in front of the chest at the end of the bed and tugged at the lid. “It’s bad down here, but no worse than upstairs. Just needs warding – or closing off, like the outhouse.” He made a disgruntled noise and started rooting around in his pockets. 

“What’re you doing?” Alex asked,

“Need a paperclip or a safety pin or something.”

“How about this?” Kyle took a hairpin from a box on the vanity with a resigned sort of slump to his shoulders, and Michael nodded, reaching up to take it.

“Perfect.”

“You can pick locks?” Kyle frowned as Michael bent the hairpin out and jiggled it into the keyhole of a small padlock Alex hadn’t seen. 

“It’s a useful skill,” Michael said casually, holding the padlock in a way that concealed it from Kyle’s sightline. He pulled the hairpin out and the padlock opened easily. “And it’s not like these are complicated locks.” He unhooked it from the chest and pushed it open. “Okay. Well…okay.”

Alex stared at the collection of soft toys, dolls, and baby clothes as Kyle reached down to pick up the photo of the baby. “This is my dad,” he whispered. “I’d recognise his hands anywhere.”

“Sheriff’s uniform didn’t give it away?” Michael asked dryly, and Alex nudged him reprovingly with his foot. “Any idea who the kid is? I’m guessing it’s not you.”

“It’s a girl,” Kyle said softly. “He had a daughter.”

“You have a sister.” Alex stepped around Michael to look at the photo as well. “Do you have any idea who she is?”

Kyle shook his head slowly. “He never said anything, and I’ve never heard my mom mention it either.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know.” Michael sorted carefully through the rest of the contents of the trunk. “But hey, secret daughter is kind of better than secret lover?”

“How do you think he got the daughter?” Kyle asked acidly. 

Alex touched the edge of the photograph, staring at the rose on the blanket, and the embroidered _R_ next to it. A horrible suspicion was taking root in his mind. “You’re sure this daughter would be the result of an affair?”

“My parents got married seven years before they had me,” Kyle said. “And if he didn’t have this kid while they were married, why hide her?”

Michael stood up and looked at Alex with calculating eyes. “You know who she is.”

“I don’t,” Alex said. “There’s no way to be sure.”

“Who?” Kyle’s hand tightened on the photo. “Who, Alex?”

“Just…the R, and the rose. And the detox stuff.” Alex hated it, but he met Kyle’s eyes. “It could have been Rosa.”

“Rosa?” Kyle blinked, and Michael went very still. “As in Rosa Ortecho? Liz’s sister?”

“Maybe. The rose was her symbol, she drew it everywhere.” Alex sighed and looked away. “I don’t know, there’s no way of knowing, right? It’s just the first thing I thought.”

“You knew her better than either of us,” Michael said, standing up with a closed-off expression on his face. 

“Not as well as Maria and Liz.” It still hurt, thinking of Rosa. It would have sounded cold to say out loud, but he’d never cared about the loss of Jasmine and Kate. Girls like that, from his perspective back then, were a dime a dozen. Rosa had been special. Rosa was the only person whose opinion he’d cared about when it came to his music tastes. Rosa had encouraged him to stand up to his dad and break the rules. She’d given him a brand-new eyeliner pencil as a present out of the blue. Her delighted whoop of approval when she’d seen him with his septum ring for the first time had meant the whole world.

“She never liked me.” Kyle was so quiet, and Alex looked at him quickly. He was still staring at the photograph. “You think she knew?”

“Rosa liked secrets.” Alex shook his head, trying to shrug off the cobwebs of the past. “She wouldn’t have told me something like that.”

“Would she have told anyone?”

“Maria. But if she had…I don’t know…” Alex shook his head again. “Maria was always the most loyal to her, but this is a huge secret. This isn’t just…keeping quiet about Rosa stealing or sneaking out.”

“We don’t even know this is her,” Michael said, cutting into Alex’s thoughts. “Pink blankets with roses on aren’t exactly rare. Loads of names start with R. This isn’t what we came down here to do.” He looked at Alex, eyes hard. “We’re warding this place, not digging up family secrets.”

Alex nodded, certainty settling back into his bones. Whatever secrets they might have unearthed, they had a mission – a job. He could come back to this and examine it properly later, if at all. Right now, Michael was right – they were warding Kyle’s cabin, and looking for his family.

Kyle took the photograph with him when they went back upstairs, and Michael went back down to spray the walls with the salt solution, since Kyle wanted to keep access to the bunker, for some reason. Alex supposed it wasn’t every day that you discovered you had a half-sister. 

The warding itself was easy. String around each magnet, each one hung or stuck over a threshold, all doors and windows closed once more. They got Kyle to do it himself, and once it was done, Alex could feel the difference, at last.

“I don’t feel any different,” Kyle said cautiously, and Alex leaned against the wall as Michael walked slowly around the outside of the cabin, searching for any weak spots. “Do you?”

“Yeah. Not fixed, not by a long shot, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was when we got here. And I think you have been different,” he added. “Since we started the process, you haven’t been so distracted. Your concentration seems better.”

Kyle nodded slowly. “That’s true.” He tilted his head, considering Alex. “You didn’t answer me earlier, when I asked what it was like for you, because you didn’t wanna influence me. Would you tell me now?”

“If you want.” Alex pushed himself off the wall and came around to sit in the armchair in the corner, to the left of the fireplace. Kyle sat on the couch, twisted to face him, and Alex stretched out his prosthesis, easing the strain on his stump as much as he could. “You wanna know about the cabin specifically, or about the haunts in town?”

“Are they different?”

“Similar, but yeah. Like the difference between chocolate and fudge.”

Kyle snorted. “Weird analogy.”

“It’s something most people understand. So?”

“Here, I guess. You looked pretty rough a few times, going around the place. You said you’d never be able to sleep here.”

Alex snorted. “Yeah, definitely not.” He looked around and leaned back in the chair. “Haunts are rated on scales of how they manifest and how they behave. The usual defining characteristic people care about is whether or not they’re corporeal, which in haunt terms just means whether they have a physical manifestation, and whether they have a physical effect on their environment.”

“So…whether they can throw things at you?” Kyle raised an eyebrow and Alex shrugged.

“Kind of. Corporeal usually means stronger, but not always. I actually think behaviour is more important. I told you people only call shades out for ghosts that are giving them problems – a lot of the time, haunt activity is relatively benign.”

“So what’s going on in here?” Kyle gestured around them. “Or was going on.”

“It’s still going on,” Alex told him flatly. “It’s just been dampened down. Without searching for a nexus, I can’t tell whether everything is coming from one haunt or they’re lots of little ones, but I’m leaning towards lots of little ones. They all work together to create an atmosphere of…” He paused, weighing up different terms before deciding on, “malice.”

“Malice?” Kyle frowned.

“Mm, yeah. Right from when we pulled up – do you remember that abandoned house on the way to middle school?”

“Yeah. On Hemlock? Was it haunted?”

Alex nodded. “Yeah, but remember what it looked like? What sort of atmosphere it had?” Kids had dared each other to go up and knock on the door. They’d shoved each other into the front yard for a joke. 

“Creepy,” Kyle remembered. “My dad always said it was dangerous.”

“But there’s nothing inherently dangerous about an abandoned house,” Alex said. “Barring, like, structural integrity or whatever. You just get a feeling for some places – that’s sensitivity. And this cabin was putting off an aura like that house on Hemlock amplified way, way up. So that was like, clue one.” He snorted at Kyle’s perturbed expression. “For me, it hits pretty much all of my senses. So like the smell I told you about, like rotting meat. And I kept seeing bugs and maggots and spiders coming out of the plugholes.”

“Oh my God,” Kyle muttered, twisting to look over at the kitchen.

“They weren’t real,” Alex reassured him. “Just little haunts. The visual ones are actually the easiest to deal with, for me anyway. It’s the ones that mess with your head that really screw you up. Like you being pushed to blame yourself for things, and feeling hunted, even in your dreams.”

“You were feeling that in here?”

“A bit.” Alex heard Michael come up the porch steps and realised in the same instance that he recognised Michael’s tread. He smiled before he could stop himself, then shook it off and considered Kyle’s question again. “It was more like isolation,” he said slowly. “Like if I lost sight of either of you I might not find you again, or if I looked at you too fast, I’d see you weren’t who I thought you were. It all comes down to manipulation of fear, with haunts like this,” he explained as Michael came in and leaned against the wall next to the door, his hat still on his head.

“Like, they know what you’re afraid of?” Kyle frowned.

“Nah.” Michael spoke up. “Ghosts aren’t sentient like that.”

“Most of the time,” Alex added, and Michael conceded that with a nod.

“They’re just imprints, mostly,” he said. “A cabin this badly haunted, I’d assume something awful happened here, but if it only started doing this in the last week, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I would’ve said you were the cause.” He nodded at Kyle, who bristled. “But you’ve been staying here longer than that, so the timeline don’t fit. I don’t like not knowing the cause.” He cut Alex a look, frowning, and Kyle leaned forward.

“Isn’t there a way to find out?”

Alex couldn’t figure out what Michael was trying to tell him, and shook his head slowly before looking back at Kyle. “There are ways to try, but it’s like I told you about curses – it’s not reliable or certain.”

“I say we try anyway,” Michael said bullishly. “These wards haven’t cleaned it properly. There’s no gaps, but it won’t last unless we get the source.”

“You have a better directional sense.” Alex looked at him. “Did you see any stronger concentrations?”

“Yeah.” Michael jerked his chin at Kyle. “On you two. More Valenti at this point, and it’s better than it was than when we first showed, but it’s not gonna get any better.”

Alex sighed. “Fine. Kyle, you wanna try and find the nexus?”

“Yeah.” No hesitation at all. “Seriously, the sleep deprivation is killing me. I can’t do my job properly if I’m on edge all the time; it’s dangerous.” For other people besides himself, Alex realised he was saying, and felt that surprise again that Kyle really did seem to have changed.

“Alright.” Michael rolled his shoulders. “Alex? You got a ritual or something we can do?”

“It isn’t a ritual.” Alex realised as soon as Michael grinned at him that he’d been baited, and he narrowed his eyes. “Grab my bag, we’ll do it in the kitchen.”

“Oooh, witchcraft,” Michael teased. “Always wanted to see a real shade do some of that.”

“It isn’t – shut up, Guerin.”

Michael just laughed, and Alex pushed himself to his feet without looking at Kyle, glad he didn’t blush easily.

“So if it isn’t witchcraft,” Kyle said, a note of amusement in his voice that put Alex’s hackles up. “What is it?”

“It’s annoying.” Alex opened his bag up when Michael put it on the kitchen table, and rummaged around until he pulled out a little plastic bottle and small wooden box. “It’s going to stink up your cabin, and it has no guarantee of success.” He opened the box and pulled out a half-burned bundle of sage.

“Smudging?” Michael sounded interested.

“It’s only smudging if it’s the actual Native ceremony, being performed by someone from that culture,” Alex recited, trying not to show his annoyance too much. One of the reasons he hated doing this was the way people looked at him like he was a circus exhibit if he did. “This isn’t even smoke cleansing.” He could feel Kyle and Michael exchanging a look over his head, and he hated it. “We need the eyedrops too. You don’t wear contact lenses, do you?” he asked Kyle.

“No?”

“Good.” He tipped his own head back and put a drop in each eye without ceremony. “Can you do yourself, or do you need help?”

“Uh.” Kyle took the eyedrops. “I might need a mirror.”

“Try not to waste any,” Alex told him, and Kyle toasted him awkwardly with the drops and went to the bathroom. The second he was around the corner, Alex lowered his voice and leaned closer to Michael. “You didn’t see any concentrations at all?”

“Only round you two. Here.” Michael rested his hand on Alex’s shoulder for a moment, and Alex felt himself relax without even meaning to, a lightness stealing through his body at the touch. “Better?”

“Was it bad?”

“Not bad. Valenti’s worse.” Michael shrugged and lifted his hand away. “Doesn’t mean I have to let you deal with it on your own.”

It was kind of stupid that Alex’s stomach fluttered at that.

Kyle came back in, blinking quickly. “Ugh, that was gross. Guerin?” He made to throw the eyedrops, and Michael nodded, holding up his hand. He caught the bottle when Kyle chucked it across the table, and went around to go into the bathroom like Kyle had. Alex wondered if he was even going to put any in, and what effect there would be, if any, if he did. Kyle cleared his throat and tapped the table. “So, what’re the eyedrops for?”

He hadn’t even asked what was in them, Alex realised. Surely that was unusual, for a doctor? But maybe this was more of that weird trust Kyle was apparently trying to demonstrate. 

“They work in conjunction with the smoke,” he explained. “Helps us see where the smoke is attracted to or repelled from.”

Kyle blinked again and frowned. “Are we meant to be seeing anything now?”

“Not really, but it heightens my visual sensitivity a little. Depends on the person, really.” He squinted at Kyle. “To me, it’s like heat shimmers, or like the world is vibrating a little. Kind of disconcerting when you first put them in, but they wear off quick, usually in less than an hour.”

“That’s a relief.” Kyle made a face. “I’m getting the vibrating thing. Ugh, this is horrible. Do you see shit like this all the time?”

Alex’s lips twitched. “Not all the time.”

“You’re kind of…” Kyle squinted at him. “I don’t know, you look like you’re vibrating a bit?”

“You too,” Alex said easily. “It’s normal. Haunts react strongest to human activity, so concentration around humans isn’t uncommon.” Too late, he realised that Michael wasn’t human, and he had no idea what he would look like to their eyes now. Before he could think of anything to say, Michael came out of the bathroom and put the eyedrops on the table.

“Never used these before,” he said, blinking exaggeratedly. “I heard something about vibrations?”

“For some people,” Alex said cautiously. “Not always. It’s an unreliable method, like I said.” He picked up the sage bundle and pulled a lighter from an outside pocket of his bag, flicking it on. The moment the flame was under the herbs, smoke started rising from them. “In theory,” he said, “the smoke is repelled from haunted areas, so you have to be pretty liberal with it. Everything in here is going to smell like this for a month,” he warned Kyle, who shrugged.

“I’ll live with it.”

Michael started coughing and moved further away, making a face. “Ugh. We’re gonna smell like this for a month too, I guess?”

“You can wash your clothes,” Alex said, watching out of the corner of his eye as he put his lighter away and started walking slowly into the living room.

“Won’t help my truck. Jeez, this stuff is thick.”

“You’re the least haunted thing in the room,” Kyle joked, and Alex made sure to look calm when he nodded.

“Shades tend to be either one or the other.” Kyle had believed everything he’d said so far – why not this?

The smoke drifted towards the wards and salt lines, but didn’t indicate any specific areas of avoidance. It poured down into the bunker, and Alex ignored that for as long as possible in favour of smoking out the bedroom and bathroom properly. In such a small space, the smoke got thick fast, and it was impossible to ignore the way it clung to Michael the same way it clung to the wards.

“Want me to check out the bunker?” he offered, and Alex sighed, trying not to inhale too much. 

“I’ll come too. Kyle, you wanna stay up here?”

“Sure.” Kyle turned in a circle, squinting at the walls. “I think I’m getting the hang of this spook-vision.”

Alex opened his mouth, then closed it again and shook his head. He didn’t care enough to even go there. “Okay, hold this for a second.” He passed the smoking sage bundle to Michael, who held it away from his body as though that would stop the way the smoke drifted towards him like he was magnetised.

Alex climbed down the ladder with none of the problems he’d had before, to his intense relief. The wards were really doing their job, and the smoke probably wasn’t hurting either. When he got down far enough, he held out his hand to take the sage from Michael, and kept climbing down carefully. When he got to the bottom and turned around, he stared.

There was a patch of wall to the right of the bed that the smoke was curling against, and Alex walked over slowly. Not all of the lamps were hooked up to the central switch, and there was a floor lamp here that was dark. Alex hadn’t examined it when he’d been down here before, but now he saw that there was a sunburst design cut out of the lampshade. He knew before he even switched the lamp on that the sunburst would hit the wall in the same place the smoke was gathering.

“What’re you doing?” Michael had climbed down behind him, and Alex stepped aside to indicate the smoke.

“There’s something behind this wall. Something that’s attracting the smoke like you do.”

Michael’s breath caught, and he started coughing. “I hate this stuff,” he muttered, but pressed his hand against the wall, exactly where the illuminated sunburst fell.

“Can you feel anything?” Alex asked. He still wasn’t clear on the limits or extents of Michael’s telekinesis.

“A gap.” Michael glanced at the ladder. “I could open it,” he whispered. “We could cover it with the lamp if it’s important. He probably wouldn’t notice.”

He might, but Alex nodded anyway. “Do it.” Michael had expected him to protest, he realised. His eyes lightened, and he smiled before turning back to the wall.

“Here goes.” He lifted his hand away from the wall, and a chunk of the wall followed him with a gentle scraping sound. It was neatly done, the piece hanging in the air like it was resting on an invisible surface, and Alex found himself leaning forwards despite himself. Michael leaned down to look inside, and had to reach out to steady himself against the wall. “Shit.”

“What is it?”

Michael didn’t answer, but gently pried another piece of the wall away, widening the gap enough for him to reach in and pull something big out. Alex watched as Michael straightened and swept his hand over the surface of it, wiping away who knew how many years’ worth of dust and grime, and the glass – it looked like glass – shimmered under his touch.

It was maybe an inch thick, curved, clearly a piece of a larger whole, and Alex stared at the golden symbols and shimmering light that rippled through it. “Guerin…”

“It’s mine,” Michael whispered, and then jerked his head up to look at Alex with wide eyes. “I mean – it’s part of the ship. It’s alien.”

The smoke was curling around both of them in exactly the same way, and Alex let out a long breath. “Can you hide it in your jacket?”

“Yeah.” Michael was holding onto it like he was afraid Alex was going to take it away, and Alex gestured for him to move as he plucked the wall pieces from the air and put them inside the hole, then moved the lamp in front of it and turned it off, scuffing his foot along the ground to conceal the way the dust hadn’t settled where the lamp used to stand.

“Okay.” Alex swallowed and headed for the ladder. “Don’t let Kyle see.”

“I won’t.”

The sage bundle was crumbling away, shorter by an inch than it had been when they’d started. Alex emerged into the living room and climbed onto his feet as Kyle came around the corner from where he’d presumably been in the bedroom. “Everything okay down there?”

“Same as up here,” Alex said, going into the kitchen to douse the sage. “Nothing stands out.”

“You two do,” Michael said, climbing up the ladder into the living room and brushing himself down. Smoke swirled around him still, the wisps of it in the air drifting towards him. “You’re repelling it. Watch each other, you can see.”

Alex frowned at Kyle and backed up a few steps. There was a haze of smoke in the air now, and it was as Michael said – he could see it drifting away from Kyle, like it was repelled by him. “So what does this mean?” Kyle asked, one eyebrow raised. “We’re the problem?”

“I told you it isn’t a reliable method,” Alex said, shrugging. “We’re feeling the effects of the haunt, that’s all.”

“Nothing else is repelling the smoke though,” Kyle pointed out, and Alex shrugged again. 

“Most of the time this doesn’t show any effect at all. But you feel better now, and the wards are up, so I think you’re as protected as you’re going to get.”

Kyle’s shoulders slumped, but he nodded. “Yeah. Thank you, seriously. Both of you.” He glanced at Michael, who waved some of the smoke away to nod in acknowledgement. “I know you said you didn’t want paying or anything, but –”

“You’ll owe me a favour,” Michael cut in, ignoring Alex’s raised eyebrows. “Nothing illegal,” he added. “Nothing monetary. Just a favour, at some point.”

Kyle seemed to accept that, even if he did look a little confused. “Okay.”

“I’m good,” Alex said, lifting his hands up when Kyle looked at him. “I’ll see you around, maybe. Let me know if this starts weakening.” He gestured to the smoke and wards, and Kyle nodded.

He and Michael walked out together, smoke blowing away from Michael in the breeze. He coughed a couple of times and pushed a hand through his hair with a sigh. “I need to pick up some water on the way through town. We’re both gonna need good showers.”

“It was worth coming out though,” Alex said quietly as they reached the truck. Michael climbed in first, and Alex followed suit, biting back a grimace as a twist of pain went through his leg. “For that ship piece.”

“Yeah.” Michael had stuffed it down the back of his pants, and he pulled it out as he sat down, cradling it in his hands like it was more precious than gold. “This is worth a lot.”

“How do you know it’s a piece of your ship?” Alex asked, somehow already knowing that the answer would involve another withheld secret. “Have you seen pieces like that before?”

“Yeah.” Michael stroked the glass. It glowed under his fingertips, reacting to his touch like it was overjoyed to feel it. Alex could relate. “I…you remember one of the tables down in my bunker is covered up?”

“You have more pieces under it.” Alex didn’t want to ask. He had absolutely no right to ask, and he knew it, but at the same time, he had told Michael that anything could be useful to figuring out where Max, Isobel, and Noah had vanished to. He knew what it was like to keep secrets though, to cling to the illusion of control they gave. Rosa had known too.

Michael’s fingertips drifted across the surface of the glass again, symbols and shimmering blueish light trailing in their wake. “This is the biggest piece I’ve ever found.”

“Start driving,” Alex told him. “We shouldn’t hang around.”

Michael nodded and took a deep breath before holding the glass out to him. Alex hesitated before taking it. They both stared as the same light flared at his touch, just as it had for Michael’s. It was warm, like it had been sat in the desert sun, and Alex realised that the golden symbols weren’t under the surface, but carved into it. Michael swallowed and started the truck, and reversed them around to head back to Roswell.

“So,” he said once they were out of sight of Kyle’s cabin. “You think Sheriff Valenti knew about aliens? Or was it just a coincidence that he had a piece of the spaceship hidden in the wall of his creepy detox bunker?”

“I don’t think coincidences are happening in this case.” The alien glass was so smooth under Alex’s hands, and heavier than he’d expected. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sparkle and swirl of the light inside it. “Jim Valenti knew about aliens.”

“He didn’t tell Kyle though,” Michael said, and Alex nodded.

“Kyle definitely doesn’t know.” He took a deep breath. “I bet my father did though.”

Michael looked at him sharply, the truck bouncing over the bumps in the path. “You said you didn’t want to look at his involvement.”

“I didn’t…” Alex watched purple light ripple out from where his skin touched the glass, other colours shining through the longer he stared. Reds and blues, hints of green in places. The colours were spackled, almost, when he looked closer. Like a watercolour painting, or ink blots. “I recognise these,” he realised suddenly. “I saw symbols like this in my dreams. On the walls.”

“I should’ve shown you earlier.” Michael shook his head, and when Alex finally tore his eyes away from the glass, he saw that he was scowling. “I’m too used to keeping secrets.”

“I know how that goes.” Alex looked back at the glass. “If my father is involved,” he said slowly. “We need to be incredibly careful.”

“Why?” Michael asked. “He’s not even an officer. He’s a big fish in a small pond in this town.”

“And this town is where you live,” Alex said harshly. “I don’t want you on his radar. I don’t want you anywhere near him.”

“Bit late for that,” Michael laughed, lip curled, and Alex’s heart froze in his chest. He could hear the hammer falling on Michael’s hand, hear his screams. His throat was tight, suddenly, any words he might have said choked off. Michael made a sound he couldn’t interpret. “No, I mean – we live in the same town. I avoid him as much as I can, believe me, but Roswell isn’t big. I still see him around sometimes.”

Alex breathed out. His chest still hurt, but he could breathe. He’d had grand ideas once of returning to Roswell and confronting his dad, of fighting him or forcing him away somehow. He’d wanted to learn how to fight back, and he’d known even then that to do so he’d have to learn his dad’s tactics first. But then he’d decided, he didn’t know when, that the smartest, safest thing to do would be to just stay away.

Cowardly. But he’d always been that, deep down.

“Alex?”

“Mm.”

“You okay?”

“I don’t want you anywhere near him,” he said again, uselessly. 

Michael didn’t say anything for so long that Alex thought they might just ride in silence all the way back to town. Then, finally, “I don’t want you anywhere near him either.”

Alex laughed, a breathless, half-gasp that he wanted to stuff back inside his mouth the second it burst out. He rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head. “We’re not…we’re not doing this right now, okay?”

“What d’you think we’re doing?”

“I can’t talk about this right now.” Alex wanted to flee, find somewhere private and safe and hide for a while, somewhere no one would see him or demand anything from him. Somewhere Michael wouldn’t be able to find him, so that Alex could regain a little equilibrium and sense. “Tell me about the other pieces like this,” he said, watching alien symbols bloom under his hand as he swept it across the surface of the glass. “How many have you found?”

“A lot. But usually in really small fragments.” Michael swung the truck onto the main road. “I think it’s the console, the ship’s central control panel.”

“And you’ve been repairing it?”

“It repairs itself.” Michael looked over at the glass in Alex’s lap. “When the right edges line up, the molecules sort of knit together on contact. There’s no seam or anything. It’s like it was never broken, like they were never separated at all. Like the pieces want to be together.”

Alex absorbed that, and had to swallow before he could ask, “Why do you think it’s a control panel?”

“You’ve seen the other pieces of the ship I’ve got. They’re inert, y’know? They’re just materials, like wood, or plastic. This…it’s like it’s alive. I think if I can get all of it, or enough, if I can figure out how to get it working, it’s my best chance of getting out. My only chance.”

“Getting out?” 

“If I can attach it to a vehicle –”

“You want…” Alex stared at the glass, a cold sort of feeling settling in his stomach. “You want to leave. The planet.”

Michael breathed out, the sound loud even over the sound of the engine and the rumble of the wheels on the road. “I wanna have the option. But it’s not…it’s not like I can just weld an alien console onto the hood of my truck and blast off. But the way the material reacts to touch, it’s like it’s trying to communicate something. If I can figure out how to make it work, if I could…if I could _communicate_ with the place it came from…”

“Your home planet,” Alex said blankly.

More silence. Michael leaned back and adjusted his left leg, crooking it out a little more. Alex felt paralysed, a strange sort of grief holding him frozen. “The ship crashed seventy-three years ago,” Michael said suddenly. “The effect of gravity on time and the way space travel might work for my species…I have a hundred theories I can’t prove. I’m like a caveman trying to figure out nuclear fission by reading explanations in a language I can’t translate. I’m wasting my life. I might die before anyone ever comes back, or I might be an old man, or they might drop out of the sky tomorrow.”

There was a trembling sort of agony in his voice that hurt to hear, and Alex closed his eyes. As beautiful as it was, he didn’t want to look at the purplish alien ship fragment right now.

“I need to do _something,_” Michael went on. “I can’t just sit around and twiddle my thumbs. I can’t set up camp at Foster’s Ranch and plant my ass in the dirt and wait. I’m done waiting. If they ever come back, I want them to see that I didn’t forget them. I don’t wanna assimilate, like Max and Isobel have.” His hands were tight on the steering wheel, Alex saw when he cracked his eyes open. The broken, crooked fingers on his left hand were the only ones extended. “They might come back and we wouldn’t even know how to talk to them. I want any alien who comes back to Roswell to know I want them there. When I was a kid, I used to look up at the sky and hope something up there would save me.” He shook his head, jaw set. “I know that isn’t gonna happen. And if they come back, I want them to see that I’m trying to save myself. I’m not some lost kid anymore.”

This time, the silence was longer. Minutes went by, with Alex alternating his gaze between the ship fragment and the road, the sun hot on the side of his face.

Eventually, it became too much for Michael. “Are you gonna say anything?” 

Alex breathed out on a slow count of four. “If I don’t know what to say, I try to keep my mouth shut.”

“You think I’m an idiot.”

“What?” Alex frowned at him, and saw with a lurch the anxious turn to Michael’s mouth. “I don’t think you’re an idiot. I don’t understand why you’d care what I think.” 

_Petulant baby._ He heard it in his father’s empty, disdainful voice, and wanted to burn alive from embarrassment.

“Seriously?” Michael snorted. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told about this. Not even Max and Isobel know. You know all my secrets now, pretty much. Why wouldn’t I care what you think?”

Put like that, it made a sort of sense. “I don’t think you’re an idiot,” Alex told him. “I think…honestly, it’s incredible what you’ve managed to do with the few resources you have. I guess…” He looked down at the alien glass and ran his fingertips over it the way Michael had, watching the sparkling light ripple in response. “I get why you hate this planet,” he said finally. “And all the people on it. I get that. It just sucks that we made that happen.”

“You didn’t. I don’t hate all the people.” 

“Just most of them.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Ringing endorsement, thanks, Guerin.” Alex’s laugh was hollow, and Michael made a frustrated sound.

“I mean it.”

“Thanks.”

Michael shook his head, and this time the silence lasted. 

After a while, Alex couldn’t bear to keep looking at the ship fragment. He put it carefully on the seat between him and Michael and made himself start thinking of their next move. The trip out to Kyle’s cabin had been illuminating, though not exactly in the direction he’d expected. 

Jim Valenti had known about aliens. Alex was sure his dad knew too. The military was still involved, but how deeply? Had he been the one to abduct Max, Isobel, and Noah? And if so, on whose orders? And if it had been ordered, how had Michael slipped the net? Max and Isobel had wandered out of the desert with a third child, and there was no way that anyone could mistake Noah for that child.

Alex suddenly itched for his laptop. It would be easy to check Noah’s background out properly. He should have done it before. And if it delayed their approach of his dad, well, that was fine. He needed to prepare for that anyway. A man like Jesse Manes couldn’t be bulldozed. Alex had studied him for his entire childhood – he knew how his father worked, and he knew that only a sideways attack had any chance of success. Not even directly from behind, because his dad always covered that angle, but from somewhere unexpected. Somewhere his father hadn’t even considered.

He tensed to stop a shudder as they crossed an invisible boundary line on their way back into Roswell, and Michael glanced over, then reached out to touch his wrist.

“It’s barely affecting me yet,” Alex muttered, looking down at Michael’s fingers against his skin, gold on gold. 

“It is affecting you though.” Michael slid his hand around Alex’s wrist, holding on properly, and Alex let him. Michael needed him sharp, after all, not half out of his mind, jumping at shadows. “It was affecting Valenti too,” Michael said in a low voice. “I didn’t bother with the eyedrops, I see fine without ‘em. He was hazed up as bad as you were when you got back from town both times this morning. It’s like the ghosts are iron filings and you’re a magnet, getting stronger the longer you stay.”

“They’re affecting me faster,” Alex agreed, and frowned at him. “You think it has something to do with Kyle?”

“Valenti and Manes, maybe. Curses can be blood-based, right?”

“Yeah.” Alex tried to ignore the way Michael’s palm was hot around his wrist. “You think _I’m_ cursed?”

“If this haunt is alien-related, maybe you are. It was a Manes who oversaw the crash site in the beginning. Maybe he did some unspeakable things, y’know?”

Alex laughed humourlessly. “I think you can dispense with the maybes on that front, Guerin.”

Michael’s hand tightened briefly. “Okay. And Valenti senior was obviously in the know. Maybe the cover-up is like…I don’t know. Maybe Max and Isobel being hurt triggered some haunt-related power they didn’t know they had, and it’s targeting people who’ve hurt our species.”

“Yeah.”

“You already knew this,” Michael realised, accusatory.

“I’d considered it.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It was a theory.” Alex sighed. “And I didn’t want it to be the one that ended up being true.”

“Wait, how many theories did you have?”

“Well my wildest one was about star alignment,” Alex said. “I try to consider all the angles.”

Michael’s grip on his wrist loosened, then tightened again. “What’s the next step then?”

“Back to your trailer, dig into my father specifically, make a plan for tomorrow.” He swallowed. “I’ll need to stay again, overnight. I’m –”

“Good.” Michael squeezed his wrist. “That’s good.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t, Alex wanted to shout. It was a terrible idea. Michael wanted to leave the entire planet, and he only needed Alex around to help find his family in the meantime. Getting this attached to him was idiotic in the extreme, but he couldn’t help it. He was well past the point of turning back. 

Driving through the centre of town was easy with Michael holding onto him. Alex felt the haunt hit him like a full body blow when he had to let go, and he turned away to get out of the truck quickly so Michael wouldn’t see his face, leaving the ship fragment on the seat for him to take. It was like he was suddenly aware of the full scope of the sky overhead. The clouds that had looked so innocuous moments before were suddenly sinister, solid and threatening above them. He felt as exposed as he had in the locker rooms at school, in warzones overseas, in the tool shed as his dad closed the door and picked up the hammer. Pinned and helpless.

“Alex?”

“Give me a second,” he ground out. He was pressed flat against the outside of the truck, barely resisting the urge to crawl underneath it to shelter from the threat his body insisted was coming. “Don’t help,” he snapped as Michael rounded the front of the truck. “Just wait.”

Michael did. And Alex counted his breathing, curled his toes in his shoe to feel the salt crunch, and finally forced himself to look up.

It was just a sky. And if it fell now, it would crush him whether or not he was hiding under a truck or in the trailer. It was just a haunt. It was just a haunt manipulating his brain into feeling things that couldn’t actually hurt him. 

He took a deep breath and pushed himself away from the truck, stump burning with sudden pain when he put his full weight on it. He didn’t show it, but he didn’t protest when Michael grabbed his bag from the back.

“What does it look like for you?” he asked Michael inside the trailer. It was stuffy inside, the air too warm. He sat in the armchair and watched Michael crank the windows open to get a cross breeze, the alien glass placed gently on the table. “Do I haze up instantly?”

“Pretty much, yeah. It’s definitely getting worse.” Michael frowned at him and came over. “Can I…?”

“Yeah.”

Michael’s hand drifted out to brush his shoulder, and the exposed feeling receded. “You hungry?”

No, but he should have been. Alex sighed. “I could eat.”

“Leftover chilli okay?”

“Sure. You mind if I take my leg off?”

Michael blinked. “No?”

Alex shrugged, and ducked his head to do so. His stump hurt too much for him to put pride before common sense. 

“Shit.” Michael sighed and looked towards the back of the trailer. “I forgot about water. You gonna be okay if I head out and get some?”

“I’ll survive,” Alex said. “Go – I can lay down some salt if it gets really bad.”

He noticed when he took them off that his iron bracelets and anklets were beginning to rust. He was positive they’d been rust-free when he’d arrived in Roswell. The corrosive effect of the haunts, he assumed.

It was a relief to get his prosthesis off, and he was glad Michael wasn’t in to see him literally pour sweat out of the liner and down the sink. He settled into the armchair with his laptop, crutches in reach, and got started on digging into Noah Bracken. 

He heard Michael return, and heard him moving around outside, presumably emptying and refilling whatever water tanks he needed. Alex tuned it out and kept working, so absorbed he’d managed to tune out the vague sense of surveillance as well. The haunt was secondary to the work right now.

Michael didn’t bother him when he came back inside. Alex’s concentration only broke when he pulled his shirt off. “We both stink of smoke,” Michael said when he caught Alex looking, and walked to the back of the trailer as he unbuttoned his fly. Alex had almost managed to get himself back in the zone when Michael emerged from the shower, mostly dry, his blue towel wrapped around his waist.

Desire pulsed through Alex’s body with shocking intensity, and he forced himself to lower his gaze to his screen, not seeing a single word on it as Michael tugged the towel loose and draped it around his shoulders to catch the drops that were falling from his limp curls. 

“Shower’s free,” Michael said quietly, pulling on underwear and a different pair of jeans. They were rattier, older, with holes at the knees that were clearly from use, not artfully pre-ripped.

“Okay.” Alex would tell him what he’d found after he’d cleaned up. He put his laptop aside and stood, shifting forward to hold his balance between the kitchen counter and the table. Using his crutches in such a small space would be more trouble than it was worth. Michael threw the spare towel from yesterday into the bathroom, landing it neatly in the sink, and waited for Alex to move one of his arms so he could slide past.

He smelled of a spicy sort of shampoo, almost herbal. Alex had to close his eyes against the desire to turn his head and tuck his nose against Michael’s neck to breathe it in. A second, that’s all there was, and then Michael had passed him, and Alex could move forward again, refusing to let himself be embarrassed by having to hop. 

He showered kneeling, like he had yesterday, and tucked the towel securely around his hips after drying himself off as best he could. He swung himself back into the main area and sat on the bed, wishing Michael wasn’t sitting quite so close. He could feel Michael looking at him, and when he looked back, Alex saw him drop his gaze. He felt it drag across his bare chest, down to where the towel was draped damp across his thighs. He swallowed and steeled himself. “How much do you know about Noah?”

“Noah?” Michael’s eyes snapped back up to his, potential mood thoroughly killed. “What about him?”

“He’s the weak link in this. I’m going on the assumption that whatever happened to your family, there was military involvement. They’d have the resources to dig into Max and Isobel’s past easily, and anyone who knew they were aliens wouldn’t be making a leap to assume you were one too, since you were all found together.”

Michael leaned back in his chair, expression guarded. “Alright.”

“But whoever took your family assumed Noah was the third alien instead.” Alex shook his head. “Three pods, three aliens. But they would know by now that Noah’s human, if he was.”

“What the hell do you mean, _if?_” Michael glared at him. “Noah’s human.”

“Maybe he is, but maybe he isn’t.” Alex pulled on sweatpants instead of jeans, not bothering with underwear. Michael’s gaze didn’t waver from his face this time. “But he definitely isn’t who he says he is. Whether he’s human or not, his identity is fake. It’s constructed. Noah Bracken doesn’t exist.”

Michael shook his head, slowly at first, then faster. “No. No way. You don’t know him; you’ve never met him – he’s harmless. He’s like a goddamn retriever in human form.”

“Check my laptop.” Alex nodded at it, sitting on the armchair where he’d left it. “See for yourself.”

Michael got up to grab it, jerking it open. Alex pulled on a t-shirt and pushed himself upright to drape his towel over one of the closet doors like Michael had done, pulling them both open so they could dry a little better.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Michael admitted, and Alex shuffle-hopped to stand behind him, leaning against the fridge.

“Records of Noah’s life.”

“He’s got a birth certificate right there!”

“And it’s fake,” Alex said patiently. “Mona and Karan Bracken are fake names. His degree is fake. I can’t find any records of him living anywhere but Roswell. It’s like he appeared here in 2013 out of nowhere. He starts working at the Evans’ law firm, meets Isobel, marries her a few years later – the marriage licence is one of the only real documents I can find a record for.”

“Maybe he’s in witness protection?” Michael suggested weakly.

“Unlikely.” Alex sighed and hopped past him to go and sit in the armchair again. “The thing is, if you arrested three people you suspected weren’t human, the first thing you’d do is test it. If one of them turned out to be human, you’d look for the third you _know_ is out there. So why hasn’t anyone come for you?”

He regretted his phrasing when Michael’s jaw clenched. “Guess my only real connection to Max and Iz to anyone looking is how we were found,” he said, mouth twisting in an unpleasant smile. “We don’t even hang out together anymore. Noah makes more sense, if you’re looking for a third alien. But there’s no way he is one.”

Alex shrugged helplessly. “He has to be something, Guerin. Otherwise they’d have tracked you down by now.”

Michael shook his head. “This guy…look, maybe there is something dodgy about him, maybe he’s hiding from something, but if he was an alien, we’d _know._”

“Maybe he’s hiding the same way you are,” Alex suggested. “You said Isobel’s never told him what she is – maybe he’s been hiding the same secret all along. We can ask him when we figure out where they are.” He didn’t miss the way Michael’s shoulders lifted at that. “My dad’s the next angle,” he said reluctantly. 

“I can go check out if he’s haunted,” Michael offered, and Alex shook his head.

“No. Your truck is way too recognisable.”

“And you don’t want me near him,” Michael said dryly. “I can take care of myself, you know.”

Alex shook his head and just held out his hand for his laptop. He didn’t know how to explain that the thought of Michael and his dad in the same room made him feel sick to his stomach. “We don’t want a direct approach with him. I need more information. We need more information. And we don’t have the luxury of time.”

They were both quiet for a moment, and Alex’s heart sank as he realised that Michael was waiting for him to come up with something. Michael winced like he could tell Alex had noticed, and got up to open the fridge. “Can’t plan on an empty stomach.”

They ate outside, Alex using his crutches instead of reattaching his prothesis. They decided to hit his childhood home the next morning, if his dad left for work. Alex had no idea what his schedule was anymore, but he’d never minded working weekends in the past, and he didn’t expect that had changed. When he told Michael how early they would need to be up, he griped about it but didn’t protest.

“Do you wanna see the console?” Michael asked as dusk began to fall, head tilted like he wasn’t sure of Alex’s answer.

“Yeah.” Alex didn’t even have to think about it. “You’re gonna add the new piece to it?”

“Maybe. If it fits.” Michael smiled though, and as he pushed himself to his feet the trailer shifted to expose the bunker hatch. The alien glass flew out of the open door of the Airstream and into Michael’s hand.

“You have a bunker, Kyle has a bunker,” Alex muttered, getting to his feet as well and grabbing his crutches to hop after him. “I’m getting jealous.”

Michael snorted. “At least Valenti’s has probably upped the value of that cabin. Extra square footage, right there.” Alex grinned, and tried to bite it back when Michael looked over his shoulder at him, laughing when he saw him. “You gonna be okay getting down on one leg?”

“Yeah, that part’ll be easy, as long as you can take my crutches down.”

“No problem – I’ll float them down.” Michael climbed down first, and Alex waited for him to reach the bottom before kneeling at the edge of the hole and passing his crutches down. He felt it when Michael’s powers took them, tugging them gently from his grip. He watched them move down into Michael’s hands, and let out a breath before turning around to climb down after them. 

At the bottom, Michael had already gone to the table covered with the tarp, and as soon as Alex had taken a couple of hops closer, he threw it off without ceremony. Alex steadied himself with a hand on the central table and stared. The tarp had hidden how big it was, and how beautiful. “Why do you keep it covered?” he asked without really meaning to. “If you’re the only one who ever comes down here?”

“It’s distracting, sometimes.” Michael turned to look at it. “Especially now I’ve got so much of it in one piece.”

Alex could understand that. It was a strange, asymmetrical shape, curved like a letter C but with long, tapering ends from the bigger, bulbous centre. The colours were almost striped along it, like a colour spectrum that went from red to green to purple and back, with blues and pinks and oranges in between. The same sort of golden symbols that had been on the shard they’d found in the Valenti cabin glinted on the console, if that was indeed what it was. 

Not quite a C, he realised on closer inspection. The basic shape was a C, but each arm had two parts to it – bulbous on the outer sides, and then a concave part on the inner side. The outer edges might have been the same once, but Michael had pieced together their upper halves in their entirety. Alex might have thought the concave parts were complete, if there weren’t a couple of shards attached there, obviously forming part of an upper half. A few unattached pieces sat next to the whole, and they were all small. How long had it taken Michael, Alex wondered, to find pieces that small and figure out which edges matched? The work of years. His lifetime on Earth.

It was so obviously alien. Just by looking at it, Alex was sure it had more colours in it that his human eyes weren’t capable of perceiving. “It’s beautiful,” he said quietly, and was glad he’d said it when Michael smiled, a small, almost relieved curl of his lips.

“It is, isn’t it?”

Alex nodded and shuffled closer, holding tight to the handles of his crutches. “Were all the pieces you’ve found that small?” he asked, nodding at the little shards laid out carefully in front of the console.

“Not all. Biggest was about half the size of the one in Valenti’s bunker. But I’ve got…” He darted over to a drawer and pulled out four larger pieces, similar in size to the one they’d found earlier. “I can’t make these fit anywhere along any edges or with each other, but I fit them together from smaller pieces. And I kinda like having smaller pieces like this.” He hesitated and came over, laying the pieces on the central table. “When I was living at Foster Homestead, I was still keeping all this down here but I couldn’t come back so often. So I kept a couple of these pieces with me.”

Pieces of home. Alex nodded. 

Michael got the piece they’d found in Kyle’s bunker and cradled it in his hands like it was alive, and infinitely precious. Alex took half a step back to better watch, a strange part of him aching at the sight of Michael’s swollen, twisted fingers illuminated in the soft light that shimmered inside the alien glass. Michael had otherworldly hands, holding a piece of his home world that had travelled an inconceivable distance to Alex’s planet. And his species had met Michael with violence right from the moment of his arrival.

Maybe it was shame that made his stomach hurt to see Michael shift the weight of the fragment to his left hand and forearm so he could run his more dextrous fingers along the edges. He was so gentle with it; it gave Alex a whole new appreciation for the way Michael had allowed him to hold it in his lap on the ride home.

Fuck – the ride back to the trailer. Not home.

Michael reached out and started tracing the edges of the console – trying to figure out if there was anywhere the new piece would fit, Alex realised. He watched in silence, not wanting to try and analyse the edges himself. He didn’t know if Michael would appreciate it. It seemed like the sort of thing he would prefer to do himself.

He could tell when Michael had found it, because he took an extra deep breath, like he was preparing himself. He shifted his grip on the piece and held it in both hands as he walked around to the other side of the table to feel the edges on the other side of the C shape’s lower arm. Alex realised he was trying to think of the best way to describe it as if he was going to write it up in a report for a superior, and forced himself to stop with an internal shudder.

Michael’s good hand drifted over the console, almost caressing it, and his face was serene as he lifted the piece they’d found and held it out over an edge. The moment the pieces touched, they melted together. Alex’s lips parted, eyes wide, and Michael lifted his head to grin at him in pure, giddy triumph.

“Wow.” Alex swallowed. “That’s…”

“Amazing, right?” Michael’s smile shrunk to something more like a smirk, though his eyes were still dancing.

“Amazing,” Alex agreed, shuffling closer carefully. “Can I touch it?”

“Yeah.” Michael looked pleased to have been asked, and Alex reached out and touched the place where the piece they’d found had joined onto the rest of the console. It was just as Michael had said – there was no seam, no raised line or bump or any indication at all that it had ever been broken. Were Alex a philosophical man, he might have been inclined to think on the fact that Michael’s species could apparently erase mistakes, and leave no scars. 

He brushed his hand over the larger, bulkier part of the console nearest him, feeling the odd, undulating shape of it. “Is it always warm?”

“Yeah.” Michael skated his hand over the top of the curve closest to him. The radiating shimmers of light from their hands rippled out towards each other, fading before they could quite touch. “I have no idea what it’s drawing energy from. I’ve left all sorts of energy sources nearby it, but it doesn’t affect them. Doesn’t affect the temperature of the environment around it other to raise it a little if the space if confined.”

“So it isn’t pulling heat from the air,” Alex summarised, and Michael nodded. 

“Doesn’t seem to be pulling it from anywhere. I’ve experimented, but it doesn’t matter what I try – it doesn’t react to anything but skin contact.”

“From humans too,” Alex murmured.

“And animals, and living plants.”

“Living plants?”

“Yeah. You know a plant starts dying the moment you pick it, right?” Michael shrugged. “It can tell the difference between them. Reacts to the leaf of a potted plant, no reaction to the leaf of the same plant if it’s plucked.”

Alex nodded slowly, watching the light under his fingertips fade as he pulled them back. “We should probably head back up.”

Did Michael look disappointed? He turned away before Alex could see, curls bouncing as he nodded. “Yeah. Early start, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.” Michael turned back to him, something strange in his eyes. “Take one of the pieces.”

“What?”

“Take one. A little one, something you can hold in one hand.” He gestured to the four fragments closest to Alex. All small, the glass much thinner than the piece they’d found.

“Why?”

“I’ve got a theory.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “Wanna tell me what it is?”

“Nope.” Michael smiled, not a trace of humour in it. “You’ll just have to trust me.”

Bastard. Alex looked at the pieces and picked up the one on the end closest to Michael. It was all jagged edges with a sharp point at one end, just big enough to cover Alex’s palm and poke out a little on the pointy side. “Okay,” he said calmly, looking at Michael and closing his hand around it. “Now what?”

“Put it in your pocket.” Michael’s smile acquired an edge of genuine pleasure. “Let’s go.”

Going up a ladder with one leg was easier than going down one, but Alex still accepted Michael’s hand up when he reached the top of it. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” Michael tilted his head back to look at the sky, and behind them the hatch swung up into place. Alex took his crutches with one hand and let go of Michael with his other, and since Michael didn’t seem inclined to move yet, he slipped that into his pocket to touch the shard of alien glass again, just checking it was still there.

It was, of course. Alex rubbed his thumb over the smooth surface and looked up to see what had Michael so captivated. He expected it to be stars, so he was momentarily taken aback when he saw none. Cloud cover, he realised, and in the same second understood what Michael’s theory was. “Smart.”

“Hm?”

“Your theory.”

Michael looked at him, eyebrows raised. “You know what it is?”

“Kind of obvious now.” Alex couldn’t quite resist the urge to smirk. “The glass has the same effect as you do, when it comes to counteracting the haunt. Right?”

“It was just a theory.” Michael started to smile, eyes narrow. “What tipped you off?”

“The sky.” Alex nodded up to it. “The exposed feeling, it’s worse under the open sky. But I’m not feeling it anywhere near as bad right now, holding this.” He held up the fragment, and Michael nodded, pleased.

“You should still stay,” he said a second later.

“Yeah?” Alex smiled, riding high on knowing he didn’t have to rely on Michael’s touch for protection now. “You just don’t wanna drive all the way over to the motel.”

“Among other things.”

Alex snorted and let go of the glass to take hold of his crutches properly, moving so Michael could move the trailer back into place. “Uh huh.” The moment he lost skin contact with the glass, the pressure from the sky overhead grew, his senses beginning to scream at him to hide. He noted the nearest places he could bolt to – under the trailer, the outdoors workshop, the truck, the chairs by the firepit if he was desperate. Harder with one leg, of course, but he could crawl, he knew how to do it, he’d have to be fast, he needed to be quick.

The moment he could stand still, he put his hand back in his pocket and held onto the glass again, breathing out. 

“Coming on faster, like you said,” Michael said quietly, a step behind him. The Airstream groaned as it moved back over the hatch, nothing in Michael’s expression or stance giving away that it was him moving it. “I can see it happening. It really is like you’re magnetised.”

“Lucky me,” Alex said dryly, and took the shard out to examine it again. 

“We can tie something around it,” Michael said. “Turn it into a pendant or something so you can wear it against your skin.”

“An amulet.”

“Yeah.” Michael tipped his head in the direction of the trailer door. “You coming in?”

“Yeah.” He had to let go of the glass again to do so, but it was easier to bear when he was inside, and easier still when Michael put a casual hand on his hip as he slipped past him to the bathroom.

It was only nine, but he was exhausted. It had been a long day, he supposed. He didn’t know whether he was looking forward to or dreading going to bed with Michael again. It was more daunting this time, for some reason. 

“Beer?” Michael offered when he came out of the bathroom.

Alex shook his head, then reconsidered. “Yeah, thanks.”

Michael gave him an all-too-knowing smirk and opened the fridge, passing him a cold bottle and taking one for himself too. Alex had to put his down on the table so he could hop over to the armchair without spilling it, and leaned his crutches against the wall once he was sitting. When he looked up, his beer was suspended in the air in easy grabbing distance, and he snorted. “Show off.”

“Cut me some slack,” Michael’s lips twisted. “I don’t often get to show off. Gotta take the chance while it’s here.”

Alex nodded, taking a sip. The bitterness was grounding, something he hadn’t realised would taste so good. The effect of the long day, he was sure – it wasn’t like it was good beer or anything. He watched as Michael got another bottle out of a drawer under the table and took a sip out of that as well. Nail polish remover, he realised as the smell hit him.

“Salud,” Michael said dryly, meeting his eyes and lifting the bottle before taking another sip.

“Are you in pain?” Alex asked, too blunt in his surprise.

“Nah.” Michael smiled and sat down, legs sprawling. “Just a pick-me-up.”

“Would you tell me if you were?” He was more curious than anything else, but Michael rolled his eyes.

“Relax, man. Sure. Look, just…I don’t know, can we…”

“Not think about tomorrow?” Alex guessed, and Michael nodded. “Okay. What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever moved with your powers?” 

It was a good question. Michael laughed, and Alex felt himself smile in response. He’d never had the chance to show off? Alex could give him an opportunity.

They talked about Michael’s abilities, and then some of what he’d taught himself. Alex didn’t understand much more than the most basic of basic concepts, but it was nice watching Michael forget to be guarded and sardonic. Every couple of minutes he’d slip up and start gesturing with his hands, eyes getting wide and excited, speech coming faster. Then he’d remember himself and reign it in, going back to clipped sentences and a wry tone, like he was mocking himself for his own enthusiasm.

Alex didn’t point it out. He didn’t want Michael to be even more aware of the way he was being analysed. 

They finished their beers, and Alex was about to get up to brush his teeth when his phone rang. Dread turned his stomach to ice until he saw who was calling, and he accepted the call at once. “Hey, Maria.”

Michael, who had tensed up too, relaxed. Maria sighed, crackling through the speaker. “Hey, babe. Just letting you know I’m putting my necklace back on now.”

“Was everything okay? Did anything happen?” 

“Nah, just felt kinda…I don’t know, you know how you said people were acting weird about the Evans twins being missing?”

“Yeah? I’m putting you on speaker by the way, I’m with Guerin.” He held his phone in the palm of his hand, and the volume of Maria’s reply jumped up mid-word as he tapped the speaker icon.

“Sure, that’s fine. I think I started getting that weirdness. And like…I was going about in a sort of daze. A woman came in, Cathy, one of my regulars, and I could tell there was something wrong with her but it was like I didn’t at the same time? Or like I thought it was totally fine and normal? And now I’ve got the necklace back on I’m freaking out a bit, because she just…”

She trailed off, and Alex frowned, prompting her. “Maria?”

“She’d been scratching her arms and face,” Maria said quietly. Alex couldn’t hear any background noise around her, and figured she was in the back of the Pony or outside, taking her break. “She was actually bleeding in a couple of places. And when I put my necklace on and freaked out, she didn’t seem to notice either? It was fucked up, Alex. I don’t like this, whatever’s happening. I’m not taking my necklace off again.”

“I won’t ask you to.” Alex met Michael’s worried gaze, sure it was mirrored on his own face. “Did you feel anything influencing you at all?”

“Not apart from that weird blankness, no feeling of being watched like you mentioned.”

“Okay.”

“What have you guys been up to? Are you closer to finding Michael’s family?”

It was only because he was looking at Michael that Alex caught the tiny flicker of emotion that crossed his face when Maria called them that. Disbelief and pleasure, followed by a frown. “Not yet,” he said, answering her himself. “We think the military might be involved.”

Alex could have happily lived without involving Maria in that aspect, but there was no taking back what Michael had said.

“The military?” Maria repeated. “Like…Alex?”

“Like my dad, yeah.” Alex looked at the phone rather than Michael’s face. “It’s just a theory at this point.”

“You’re gonna be careful, right?” She sounded worried, rightfully so, and Alex nodded reflexively even though she couldn’t see him.

“We’re not going to talk to him or anything. I don’t want to get anywhere near him if it can be avoided.”

“Good. You guys turn up anything else?”

“Do you want to know?” Alex asked before Michael could let anything else slip. “Seriously, we’re getting into illegal territory now, Maria. I don’t want to put you at risk at all, even if it’s just a theory at this point.”

Maria hesitated, then sighed, irritated. “Time was I’d say tell me everything,” she muttered. “Y’know? But _I_ have to be careful now. Got my mom to think about.”

“I know,” Alex said. 

Maria made a frustrated sound. “Damn. Okay, keep me out of it for now, but…I don’t know, if shit gets actually dicey, you call me, okay? If it turns into an actual nightmare, come to me. Whatever you need, I’m serious.”

“If it’s that bad,” Alex started, but she cut him off.

“_Seriously,_ Alex. You’re my family as much as my mom is, and she’d say exactly the same thing. If shit hits the fan, you come to me.” She had steel in her voice, and Alex swallowed, very glad that his head was ducked so Michael couldn’t see the way tears had sprung to his eyes. “I don’t care how dangerous it is. And that goes for you too, Guerin,” she added, firm. “I don’t want either of you pulling that ‘protect the poor civilian’ bullshit. We clear?”

“Clear, DeLuca.” Michael’s voice sounded a little rough too, and Alex smiled.

“Copy that.”

“Good. Keep me updated, okay? Even if it gets vague. Text me locations or something so if you vanish too, I know where to start looking.”

Alex kind of hated it, but the pragmatic side of him approved of having an outside operative they could trust. “Okay.”

“Promise?”

He smiled again. “Promise.”

“Okay. I love you. Have a good night.”

“You too. I love you too,” he added, quieter. Maria made a satisfied sound before she hung up, and it settled deep under Alex’s skin, soothing part of him that was almost always on edge.

“She’s alright.” Michael cleared his throat and sat up. “You look pretty beat.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed without thinking, sliding his phone back into his pocket and getting up. “Yeah, I’m gonna try and get some sleep. Do aliens need less sleep than humans?” he asked as he levered himself past, a hand on the kitchen counter, a hand on the top of the fridge.

Michael snorted. “With a sample size of _three_, I honestly couldn’t tell you.”

“Fair enough. You don’t have to crash if you’re not tired though.”

“Like it’s a hardship to share a bed with you?” Michael laughed again, just a shade mocking, and Alex felt the heat rise in his cheeks.

It was Michael who seemed nervous when they were both in his bed though. He lay on his back, shirtless, and Alex lay on his side facing him, doubts of his own swirling around his head. “Apologies in advance for the nightmares,” he said dryly, mainly to see if it would make Michael relax.

It worked, to a degree. Michael snorted and cut a look sideways at him. “Might have a few of my own tonight. You think…you think we’re getting close?”

Alex sobered, and nodded. “I do.”

Michael looked up at the undersides of the lockers above them and swallowed. “Okay.”

Alex hesitated, then lifted his arm and slid his hand over Michael’s chest to rest over his heart. “We’ll find them.”

Michael nodded, and his left hand came up to hold onto Alex’s wrist. Alex felt his chest rise as he breathed in, and when Michael turned his head to look at him again, his eyes were dark. Alex was tilting his head for the kiss he could see coming before he could even think about it, and there was no time to be embarrassed at his own presumption when Michael surged forward to close the distance.

He was an idiot. Alex knew it, even as Michael shifted onto his side and kissed him deeper, sliding his hand under Alex’s shirt to fit perfectly over the curve of his side. There was no delaying the inevitable, and he knew very well that this was just a distraction for both of them, but when Michael kissed him it was like everything in him settled and sang in harmony, not a discordant note to be found. 

Michael’s kisses were getting frantic, the nails of his two good fingers digging into Alex’s skin, and Alex pulled back a fraction to murmur, “Roll over.”

“Huh?”

“Just do it, Guerin. And get your pants off.”

Michael huffed a laugh and obeyed, shoving his boxers down as he rolled over to present his back to Alex, taking the sheets with him as he went. Alex didn’t try to tug them back. He sat up to yank his own shirt off and pushed his shorts off too, then lay down and plastered himself against Michael’s back. 

Michael arched back into him with a quiet groan, and Alex kissed his neck, wrapping his arm over Michael’s middle and tugging him back. He shifted until he could get his other arm under Michael’s head, hand buried in his hair, Michael leaning back into him pliantly. Alex’s cock was pressed up against his ass, and he fixed his mouth to Michael’s neck again for a moment before wrapping his hand around Michael’s dick and stroking slowly. 

Michael stretched against him, arching back and thrusting forwards, and when Alex tightened the hand in his hair, he shuddered and went loose again, letting Alex control the speed. He was so fucking beautiful, and Alex wasn’t brave enough to tell him. Wasn’t sure enough of himself to tell Michael how good he was, how much Alex liked the way his eyelids fluttered.

He let go of Michael’s cock and lifted his hand to Michael’s face to mutter, “Spit,” instead.

Michael grabbed Alex’s wrist and brought his hand closer to lick instead, his tongue stupidly hot as it dragged up Alex’s palm. Alex groaned as Michael pulled his hand closer so he could suck his middle and ring fingers right into his mouth, spit-slick tongue sliding between them and around them. 

He let Michael go to town for a minute, and bit his neck gently as he drew his hand away and wrapped it around his dick again. It made Michael gasp, his whole body jerking into it, and Alex kept his touch loose and easy, barely more than a tease. 

Michael’s eyes were closed, heat pouring off his body, and he made the most beautiful sound when Alex’s hips started to move helplessly against him, cock pressed tight between their bodies. “C’mon,” he breathed, reaching back with his good hand to grab Alex’s ass, encouraging him. “C’mon. Alex.”

Alex started a slow, steady rhythm, jerking Michael gently in time to it, and Michael groaned, trying to hide his face against Alex’s neck. When Alex tightened his grip on his hair to stop him, Michael smiled breathlessly. “C’mon,” he said again, his fingers digging into the flesh of Alex’s ass to try and make him go faster.

“Relax,” Alex murmured, right into his ear for the way it made Michael shiver. “I wanna watch you.”

“Perv,” Michael grinned, eyes closed, and Alex bit his neck again, harder. He wasn’t a fan of trash talk in bed, but he didn’t want to get into it now. Better to thrust even slower, but harder. To drag the palm of his hand right up and down Michael’s cock, smearing precome from the heel to his fingertips. It made Michael squirm, sensitive, and Alex licked the spot he’d just bitten on his neck. “Fuck,” Michael gasped, and Alex laughed, suddenly bold.

“You wish.”

Michael’s cock twitched against Alex’s hand, and that was so hot that Alex had to stroke him harder, not being such a maddening tease. If Michael was this hot on the outside, what would he be like on the inside? The heat of his mouth was intense enough. Alex’s cock was leaking now, his balls tight against the crack of Michael’s ass, and Michael’s free hand was twisted in the sheets and starting to shake.

“I do,” he agreed suddenly, hoarse. “I bet you’d feel so good.”

Alex’s mouth was dry. “You’d let me fuck you?”

“I’d fucking beg for it.” Michael ground himself between Alex’s hips and his hand. “Fuck, Alex –”

“What would you say?” Alex mouthed at his shoulder, trying to keep his cool, trying not to lose his head completely and roll Michael onto his stomach to just hump himself to completion against his ass.

“Stop being such a tease and I’ll tell you,” Michael sniped, and laughed when Alex did. It turned into a groan when Alex tightened his grip and sped up a little, jerking him off properly now. “God…I’d…”

“Yeah?”

Michael clenched his asscheeks, and Alex moaned. “Fuck me,” Michael breathed. “Just fucking…can’t stop thinking about it, I want it just like this, like right now, so you could pull back a bit and push in and just fuck me while you’re touching me, fill me right up so I can’t feel anything but you.”

Heat rolled over Alex’s entire body, and he knew Michael could feel the way he was thrusting harder, but he didn’t know if Michael could tell how fast his heart was racing, if he had any idea how lightheaded his words were making him. 

“I’d say please,” Michael groaned, and gasped when Alex pulled his hair harder. “I would,” he breathed. “Alex, please, please –”

Alex’s orgasm surged through him faster than he ever would have believed possible. He groaned open-mouthed against Michael’s neck, and Michael, Michael gasped, “Fuck, fuck, Alex, I want it, so fucking bad you don’t even know, wanna feel you come inside me, just like that –” He trailed off into hitching gasps as Alex dragged his head back to kiss his throat and strip him faster, harder, until Michael cried out and came in hot pulses over his hand.

Alex could feel his heart pounding, and he closed his eyes and pressed his face to the side of Michael’s neck, both of them sweaty, both of them catching their breath. “Damn,” he whispered, and Michael made a low noise of weak agreement. His cock was softening in Alex’s hand, and he rubbed his thumb over the foreskin as it came up to cover the head. It made Michael hum and smile, eyes fluttering open for a second before they fell closed again

“Wanna know the best thing about my powers?” he mumbled.

“What?”

“I can get a cloth without getting up.” In the bathroom, the water came on, and Alex laughed.

“Why haven’t you done that before?”

“Forgot.” Michael didn’t seem inclined to move, so Alex kept holding him, his hand gentle in his hair now. “Not something I’ve ever done before in front of someone, y’know?”

“Mmm.” Alex kissed his shoulder and yawned. 

They cleaned themselves and each other off with the cloth, and Michael sent it floating back to the bathroom without even a gesture, which was pretty cool. “Practical applications of telekinesis,” Alex murmured as he curled around Michael, both of them wearing shorts again. 

“Befriend your local aliens,” Michael mumbled sleepily. “Get them to float things you’re too lazy to get yourself.”

Alex snorted and pressed his forehead against the back of Michael’s head, his curls tickling his face. “Go to sleep, Guerin.”

“You got it.” Michael yawned, and Alex stayed awake to feel it as he relaxed and fell asleep. They fit together like two commas, aligned at the knees, hips, elbows. Alex’s arm was wrapped over Michael’s stomach, and he shifted lower on the bed so he could curl into Michael a little more, rubbing his forehead against the topmost knob of Michael’s spine.

He was good at not thinking about things. He saw the edges of the anxious thoughts in the back of his head, and pushed them away, boxing them up for another time. He didn’t want to think about tomorrow, or anything beyond that. He just wanted to hold onto Michael and pretend it could last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments continue to be the BEST THINGS, many blessings on you, your households, and your cows.


	6. Sunday 29th August 2021

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight heads up, this chapter goes into a bit more detail regarding the abuse Alex suffered at his father's hands.

He slept in between the nightmares. Two big ones, three smaller, one so insignificant that he didn’t even wake Michael up, which was good. Michael didn’t act any differently in the morning, so Alex pretended he wasn’t embarrassed, that the memory of the way he’d fallen right out of the bed and lashed out at Michael when he’d tried to help wasn’t smarting. A dark shape looming over him in the night had panicked him to the point of hyperventilation, but if Michael wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, Alex would take that olive branch gratefully.

They parked at the Albertsons Market and walked down at about eight-thirty. Michael had produced some thread and wound it around the alien ship fragment to turn it into a pendant Alex could string onto the silver chain he already wore. It lay warm and disconcertingly large against his breastbone, but it was doing its job admirably, keeping the worst of the haunts at bay.

Every instinct in Alex’s body told him to approach the house from behind, along the back lane like he’d always done as a kid. But they needed to see whether his dad’s car was still there, and he refused point-blank to let Michael walk past the house alone, so together they went, since Michael refused to let him go alone either.

The car wasn’t there, and Alex wished for a stupid, irrational second that he didn’t have the shard around his neck so he could have an excuse to take Michael’s hand. They walked on instead, and went up the back lane when they got to the end of the street.

The gate hadn’t been changed. No chain link fence for the Manes house – there had been a tall wooden fence around the back yard for longer than Alex had been alive, the roof of the tool shed visible above it. He remembered weatherproofing it with Flint when they were kids, remembered doing it on his own after that. Did his dad do it himself these days?

Focusing on the fence was Alex’s way of avoiding the tool shed. He couldn’t think about the tool shed.

“Should we check there first?” Michael asked though, indicating it with a tilt of his head.

“House first.” He hadn’t been back here since the day he’d left for basic. He’d run and kept running, scrambling to stay as far away from his dad as possible. He’d been tempted to come back, of course. On leave, or for visits, to see if anything had changed. To observe his father. To see Michael. 

It always came down to that, in the end. He’d wanted to see Michael again, and that wanting had been too dangerous. His dad had taken Michael’s hand the first time – what would he do if they were caught again?

The Manes house was a small one-storey building, the walls painted the same ugly brown as the roof. Alex didn’t bother checking for a spare key under a rock or anything like that – if any of his dad’s boys got locked out, they were expected to deal with it and face the punishment for screwing up. They didn’t need a key anyway: Michael’s telekinesis was the perfect lock pick, and Alex kept a tight, tight lid on the seeds of panic that were trying to take root in his chest as they stepped into his childhood home, into the kitchen that hadn’t changed at all since Alex was a kid.

“There’s less distortion here,” Michael whispered as Alex closed the door behind them. He was wearing gloves, and had made Michael wear some too in a fit of immovable paranoia. He didn’t believe in paranoia when it came to his dad anyway, and Michael’s fingerprints were on the system. There was no point in taking unnecessary risks. “You noticing that?”

“Not really. I’m wearing the shard though.” And a lack of background haunt activity could be easily made up for with an increase in background traumatic memories. 

_Look,_ he almost wanted to say, _there’s the counter my brother Flint liked to shove me into. See the way the kitchen lino’s lost its pattern in the middle? That’s because my dad made me scrub it on my hands and knees until I wanted to throw up from the smell of bleach. I know every part of that corner because I used to have to stand in it when I’d embarrassed him, and I embarrassed him a lot. That dent in the drywall is from when my brother Marcus threw a screwdriver at me. There are exactly twenty-four tiles on the wall behind the stove – I used to count them at dinner time._

“Alex?”

Alex had stopped, and he was freezing cold. He had no idea whether that was an effect of being haunted, or an effect of his memories. “I’m fine,” he lied, walking past Michael and into the hallway. He couldn’t look at Michael in this house. He couldn’t. “Let’s check the study.” 

They checked the whole house, and Alex didn’t feel like he managed a real inhalation the whole time they were doing it. He couldn’t hide the way his hands started to shake when they searched his dad’s bedroom. Michael had to do it, carefully carefully opening each drawer and sipping from a bottle of nail polish remover as he used his telekinesis to search for things in the walls, under the mattress, and anywhere else they couldn’t check without messing up the organised system.

Hunter had dared him to pull a Matilda and swap their dad’s shampoo for hair dye when he was a kid. Alex had been maybe six or seven, too young and stupid to see the way he was being set up for failure. In the absence of hair dye, he’d decided to swap his dad’s aftershave for water, and he’d been in the process of pouring the aftershave down the sink when his dad had caught him, probably tipped off by Hunter.

It was the first major punishment Alex could remember. His dad had picked him up and literally thrown him against the wall, and Alex could still remember the awful feeling of knowing how powerless he was, how small and weak. He’d tried to blame Hunter, and gotten beaten up by him too for his trouble, after his dad was done with him.

Alex stood in the doorway of his dad’s bedroom and watched Michael do the searching, the memory of his dad hitting the soles of his trespassing feet with the metal spatula from the kitchen so strong that for a second he could have sworn he felt it, even on the foot that had been blown off. The whistle of air through gaps in metal could still make him flinch if he wasn’t expecting it. 

He needed to get a grip. He dug his nails into his palms, though it didn’t hurt through the gloves, and counted his breaths. When Michael was done, they left without speaking. Whatever his dad was involved with, he didn’t keep any evidence of it in the house. They went back outside and Alex finally faced the tool shed, cold sweat under his arms. “I can –” Michael started, and Alex cut him off.

“Over my dead body are you going in there again.”

“Okay.” Michael looked at him cautiously. “But I think you’re way more freaked out about this than I am right now.”

“It isn’t happening, Guerin. Just open the door.” It had a padlock on it, always had. A combination lock that had often hung open and unused when he was a kid. It was a new padlock now, but when Michael frowned at it, it clicked open.

Alex unhooked it with steady hands and held onto it as he opened the door, stepping inside with no ceremony or outward hesitation.

The pallet bed was gone, replaced by a workbench. Alex breathed out very slowly, and held himself still for another count of four before breathing in again. It was just a shed. It was only flimsy wooden walls and low rafters and a concrete floor that he’d –

He squeezed his eyes shut as he heaved, just once, and swallowed bile back down before it would be a problem. 

First things first.

He searched through each drawer, looked in the cabinet at the back, and checked the two big toolboxes. The hammer was in the second toolbox, and Alex had to close his eyes again, hearing Michael’s scream in his head. The crunch of bone.

He’d seen worse, he told himself, a little frantically. He’d seen worse, heard worse, smelled worse. 

He closed the toolbox and made himself turn around and look at the floor.

His dad had dragged him out of the shed after catching him and Michael together, and by the time he’d been shoved back in to clean up the mess, the blood had dried. Alex had done his best, but there were still a few dark spots on the concrete. The shape of them was burned into his mind, like an awful constellation.

He walked out of the tool shed and shook his head. “Nothing in there.”

Michael reached for him, but Alex flinched away, terror driving through him like a knife. “What’re you doing?”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “You seem kinda haunted?”

“I’m fine.” He turned away and locked the door, clicking the padlock back into place. “Let’s go.”

“Whatever you say.”

Alex couldn’t speak. He couldn’t look at Michael. 

He’d forgotten what his dad smelled like. He’d forgotten how small the room he’d shared with Flint had been, now converted into a guest room.

He felt sick, physically ill, like he might have to throw up any second, and he could feel Michael getting restless as they walked back to his truck. He was bracing himself for the torture of having to speak to him when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

“It’s Maria,” he told Michael, careful not to let on how relieved he was as he accepted the call. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Could you come back to Sunset Mesa?” Maria asked, sounding hassled. “My mom’s asking for you.”

“Mimi?” Alex frowned. “What does she want to see me for?”

“She won’t say, but she says she remembers you were here the other day and she meant to tell you something but forgot. I know it’s probably out of your way, and I know this is a dick move, I know, and I’m sorry, but she almost never remembers one-off events like this anymore, and I just –”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Alex said, reckless and weak. “It’ll have to be quick though.”

“I know. Thank you, Alex, seriously.”

“See you soon.” Alex hung up and started walking faster. “It’s only a short detour,” he said. 

“It’s fine.” Michael split away from him as they reached his truck, climbing up into the cab with easy grace. He had the engine on before Alex was even inside. “It’s on the way.”

“I’ll be quick.”

Michael nodded, and the silence this time was tense.

As they headed up the drive to Sunset Mesa Assisted Living, Michael started to frown. “The hell?”

“What?”

“You said Mimi was haunted, right?”

“Yeah, but…I don’t think anything was riding her, if that’s what you mean. Why, can you see something?”

“Yeah.” Michael’s frown deepened as they drove slowly around the front of the building. The parking spaces were all full, so he drove round the side, and came to a sudden stop out of nowhere.

“Jesus, Guerin!”

“Is her room in there?” Michael pointed to the nearest window. “Like, in that direction?”

“Uh…” Alex tried to remember the turns he and Maria had taken to get to Mimi’s room. “Maybe? Can you see her through the walls?”

“I can see _something._” Michael started driving again, and swung into the first space he saw. “I’m coming in.”

“Alright.” Alex called Maria as he climbed out of the truck. “Hey, it’s me. Guerin’s with me, wants to come in too if that’s okay?”

“Sure, fine. I’ll meet you in the lobby.” She sounded frazzled, and hung up without another word.

“What’re you seeing?” Alex muttered as they walked back round to the front. 

“Concentrated distortion. Like, you remember TV static?”

“Yeah?”

“Like a hole full of static is open in the middle of the real world. Like an infestation of static. It’s like a headache.” He rubbed his forehead. “Like…I don’t know, like a sort of screeching, but real high, and I can hear something way low too, like a huge engine, throbbing.”

“You ever felt anything like this before?”

“Yeah, couple times. Poltergeist in Texas, haunted house up near Santa Fe.” Michael made a face, massaging his temple now. “Shit.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Nah, s’just uncomfortable.”

They fell quiet as they walked in, and Maria was there for them. She was wearing tight black jeans and a yellow cardigan over a collared floral shirt, bangles on her wrists – iron, Alex noticed immediately – and beads around her neck as well as her flower pendant.

They signed in quickly, and Michael grimaced as they went back to Mimi’s room. “Don’t confuse her,” Maria told him sternly. “She probably won’t remember you, so don’t get weird about it.”

“Relax, DeLuca, I’m not here to start trouble.” He got tenser the closer they got to Mimi’s door though, and when Mimi came out of it, Michael took a full step back. “Shit.”

Maria glared at him, outraged, and Alex looked between him and Mimi, who looked perfectly normal to him. Underdressed, maybe, but normal. She gasped when she saw him too, and came forward to take his hands (behind him, Michael made a strangled sound). “Alex! I knew you’d come back, you were here just a minute ago!”

“Let’s go inside, Mom,” Maria said, touching Mimi’s shoulder and gesturing to her bedroom. “Yeah?”

“It’s of vital importance.” Mimi ignored her, her grip on Alex’s hands tightening to the point of pain. “Alex, your father, we…we shouldn’t speak of it here.” She let go of one of his hands and tugged him inside with the other. Maria and Michael followed, and Michael closed the door and grabbed Alex’s shoulder a second later. “Alex,” Mimi started, but Michael pulled him away.

“Don’t, don’t touch her.”

“What the hell?” Maria was furious, but Alex let Michael pull him a step back and then very deliberately looked at Michael’s hand on his shoulder. Michael let go immediately, shifting away.

“What’s the matter?” Mimi asked, confused. “Who is this?”

“Michael Guerin, ma’am.” Alex raised his eyebrows at the way Michael stepped between him and Mimi, and between her and Maria as well. “You feeling alright?”

“I need to speak to Alex,” Mimi insisted, and blinked in surprise when Maria grabbed hold of Michael’s arm.

“What the _hell_, Guerin?” she hissed. “Get out of this room, or I’ll call security and you’ll never set foot in my bar again.”

“She’s haunted to fuck, DeLuca,” Michael snapped, glancing at Mimi. “Can’t even see her properly right now.”

“Fix it,” Alex said, and Michael looked over his shoulder at him, eyes wide. Alex didn’t relent. He would think up an explanation afterwards. “Fix it, Guerin.”

“Touch my mother and I’ll kill you,” Maria snarled, glaring between Michael and Alex. “Get out, get out of this room _right now._” She dragged Michael sideways and gave him a shove towards the door. He didn’t resist, even lifting his hands up in surrender.

“Maria.” Alex got between her and Michael, checking on Mimi every couple of seconds. She looked frightened and bewildered, twisting her fingers together and looking between all of them anxiously. “He can help. His sensitivity manifests differently, that’s all. He can lift a haunt by touch.”

“Bullshit,” Maria snapped. 

“Why would I lie?” Alex asked. They didn’t have time for this. “Do you trust me?”

Maria didn’t look at him though. She looked over his shoulder, and though she frowned, some of the animosity left her eyes. “Yeah.”

“And Guerin?”

She pressed her lips together, but eventually nodded. “Yes. Fine. Fine, if you’re going to do something, do it.”

“Maria?” Mimi drifted towards her, frowning in confusion. “I just needed to see Alex. His father, you don’t know what he’s like. He’s ruthless.”

“Didn’t need a psychic to tell me that,” Alex said, dry. “No offence, Mimi.”

“The aliens,” Mimi whispered to Maria. “They’re here, you have to be careful, sweetheart.”

The look Michael gave him was pure panic, but Alex gave him an impatient look that he hoped was reassuring. Michael didn’t seem convinced, but did inch closer.

“No aliens here, Mom,” Maria murmured, and nodded to Michael. “Remember Guerin? Still a barfly, but he’s not so bad when he’s not getting in fights.”

“The ranch hand?” Maria frowned at Michael. “Cheap beer, cheap whiskey. Drinks out of a flask when he thinks I can’t see.”

Michael snorted, and Alex realised that his eyes weren’t meeting Mimi’s – he was looking somewhere closer to her hairline like he wasn’t sure where her eyes were. “You’ve got my number. Nice to see you again.” He held out his hand, shoulders tense, and Alex waited.

“Props up the bar six days a week, and it’s only six because we close on Sundays,” Mimi murmured, shaking her head. “Smart boy, better at pool than he lets on, talks too much. Haven’t missed you, cowboy.” She took Michael’s hand, and Michael hissed, flinching back, then holding on.

“Mom,” Maria said, alarmed, but Mimi’s other hand lashed out to grab onto Michael’s wrist to keep him there, her mouth dropping on a choked gasp, eyes rolling back in her head.

“She’s okay,” Michael gritted out, and Alex grabbed his shoulder reflexively, wanting to steady him. Michael leaned into it, and reached up to cover Mimi’s hand with his other hand too. “I’ve got her.”

“What does that mean?” Maria exclaimed, holding onto Mimi’s shoulders, holding her up. “Mom?”

“Almost.” Michael grimaced, and then practically threw Mimi’s hand away from him. There was a ripple of energy that burst outwards when he did, setting the pages of a book on the bed fluttering, the windchime in the window tinkling.

Mimi staggered into Maria and looked at Michael with more awareness than she’d displayed since Alex had seen her. “Get behind me,” she told Maria, shoving her body between her and Michael. “Alex, Alex get away from him!”

Michael stepped away instead, and Alex hated, _hated_ the resigned tilt of his mouth, the slump of his shoulders. 

“It’s okay, Mimi,” he said. “Guerin’s a friend.”

“They aren’t our friends!” Mimi’s eyes were wide and frightened, but clear. She reached back and stopped Maria when she made to move away. “No! Sweetheart, I don’t know why he’s cleared me up, but don’t go near him. Alex, please, it isn’t safe.”

“Sure,” Michael’s voice was empty. “I prop up your bar six nights outta seven and get my ass kicked in fights three nights outta those six. I’m a real scary guy.”

Mimi shook her head, stepping backwards and keeping Maria pressed behind her. And Maria was crying, Alex realised with an awful jolt. She was holding onto her mother and swiping at her eyes, swallowing furiously and biting down on a trembling lower lip. 

“I don’t know what your game is,” Mimi said quietly, “but if you want any chance of a head start, you’d better start running, boy. If Jesse Manes finds out what you are, you’re screwed.”

“Where would he take me?” Michael asked, chin tipped up in a dare Alex imagined Mimi had seen dozens of times before. “Where’s worse than Roswell?”

“You don’t wanna know.” Mimi backed up another step, so Maria was pressed against the wall. “Alex, get away from him. They get in your head, sweetheart, they hurt you. What do you think’s been trapping me in my own head these last few years?”

Maria edged out from behind Mimi, and didn’t look at her as she patted the hand that Mimi grabbed to hold her back. “It’s okay, Mom,” she said quietly. “Guerin? You’re banned. I never wanna see you again. Alex, could you get the on-call nurse, please?”

“Oh.” Alex froze at the heartbreak in Mimi’s voice, suddenly needing to be anywhere but here. “Oh, no, honey.” Mimi cast a quick, distrustful look at Michael, then pulled Maria into a tight hug she didn’t return. “Honey, it’s okay, I’m okay. I know I’ve been confused, I know, but I’m better now.”

“But aliens are still real, right?” Maria’s face crumpled, and now Alex was the one looking at Michael with panic in his eyes. He’d thought that Michael could get rid of whatever haunt had latched onto Mimi, but he hadn’t thought that the haunt would cure Mimi’s dementia. Which obviously hadn’t been dementia. “Come on, Mom,” Maria whispered, pulling back and giving Mimi a shaky, false smile that made Alex’s heart ache. “It’s okay, I’m just gonna kick Guerin to the curb and grab a nurse real quick. No big deal.”

“But Maria…” Mimi looked over at Michael and Alex, her eyes wide. “He’s…no, sweetheart, you have to believe me.”

If Alex was panicked, Michael looked blank. His eyes were glassy, and Alex’s mind raced to think of an explanation that would work for everyone, that would protect Michael and validate Mimi and reassure Maria.

“She’s right.” 

Alex’s brain screeched to a halt, and he fixed wide eyes on Michael, who was pale under his stubble. “Guerin.”

“No point in lying about it now, right?” Michael swallowed and pulled the bottle of nail polish remover out of his jacket pocket, unscrewing the cap and taking a sip. “Cat’s outta the bag. You wanted me to fix her, I fixed her.”

“What…Guerin, is that nail polish remover?” Maria wrinkled her nose, catching the smell. “What the hell? Don’t, shit, don’t drink it!”

Michael toasted her and finished off the bottle. “S’fine, DeLuca. Needed a pick-me-up, is all. No need to get a nurse, your mom ain’t lying or crazy.”

Mimi twisted to get herself in front of Maria again, and Alex realised that she was shaking in fear. “You leave my daughter alone, you hear me? I’ll call Chief Master Sergeant Manes right now, I’ll scream this whole building down if you so much as _breathe_ in her direction.”

“Mom!”

Michael’s nose twitched, and he clenched his jaw. Hurt, Alex understood. Mimi DeLuca had known him since before he was even legal, and she’d always treated strays kindly.

“He’s on our side, Mimi,” Alex said quietly. “Calm down, okay? He’s not a threat.”

Mimi shook her head. “He’s got you caught, Alex, but that’s okay. Your dad can fix that, I can fix that. We’ll get him out of your head, and you’ll understand.”

“Alex, get a nurse,” Maria whispered.

“She isn’t crazy.” Michael screwed the cap back on the bottle of nail polish remover and let it go, and it stayed exactly where it was in mid-air. “I’m an alien. And I’m not gonna hurt anyone,” he added, glaring at Mimi. “So if you could chill out, that’d be great.”

Maria was gaping, and her eyes flicked to Alex, who nodded. “He’s not crazy either.”

“This isn’t happening,” she breathed. “This is _not_ happening. Float that bottle over to me if you’re really an alien.”

Michael snorted, but the bottle moved slowly towards her. Mimi looked like she was torn between attacking Michael and guarding Maria, and she lashed out to swipe the bottle aside the second it was within reach, sending it bouncing to the floor. “You stay away from us!” she spat. “Get out of here, or I’ll start screaming.”

“Fine.” Michael looked at Alex, mouth set. “Let’s go. You wanted her fixed, she’s fixed. You happy?”

“Wait.” Alex held up his hand to stop him and moved to put himself between him and Mimi just in case she did lunge at him. “Wait a second. Mimi, why do you think he’s a threat? Michael’s never hurt anyone.” 

Even in the situation they were in, Maria raised her eyebrows and mouthed, _Michael?_ at him pointedly over Mimi’s shoulder. Alex narrowed his eyes at her and didn’t respond.

“They’re violent, his race.” Mimi kept glancing at Michael over Alex’s shoulder. “They came here to kill, they’re dangerous, Alex. They can get in your head and make you do things; they can control your actions and your thoughts as easy as breathing.”

“Mom, come on, Guerin can barely control himself.”

“Harsh, DeLuca.”

Maria snorted. “Not really.” Her makeup was running from her tears, and her voice was still a little wobbly, but she was making jokes and Alex loved her for it. “Remember the time –”

“You’re really gonna embarrass me in front of your mom like this?”

“I don’t know what he’s told you,” Mimi whispered, “but they’re not _human,_ Maria. They aren’t like us.”

“Okay, but I kind of want an explanation that doesn’t sound like literal xenophobia,” Maria said gently. “Look, if Guerin wanted to hurt me, he’s had a million opportunities. Unless this is all a really trippy dream, he just…I don’t know, cured you.” Her chin trembled. “If this is real and you’re okay, I need you to sit down and explain stuff.”

“I’m not sitting down with him in the room,” Mimi said, and Alex sighed.

“Okay, fine. Tell me what you know about my father then. If he took Michael –” Fuck it. “– where would he take him? If my dad took any aliens captive, is there a facility or something he’d take them to?”

Mimi shook her head. “Fight against him, Alex. You can do it, I know you can. You’ve always been strong.”

“We’re wasting our time,” Michael muttered, and Alex scowled at Mimi.

“My dad has kidnapped three innocent people because he believes they are aliens. This entire town is drowning in ghosts and has been since that happened. Mimi, I need you to tell me what you know.”

But Mimi shook her head, mouth pressed in a thin, stubborn line. “It’s too dangerous, Alex. We aren’t meant to touch things from other worlds.”

“Michael is not dangerous!” Alex hissed, mindful of the fact that he couldn’t raise his voice. It was beyond bizarre to be so angry at someone he’d always loved and respected so much. “And he isn’t messing with my head! He’s a good person. He isn’t _violent_, and he hasn’t come here to kill anyone. He didn’t choose to come here at all.”

“Forget it, Alex.” Michael sounded embarrassed. “Come on, let’s just go.”

“Not if there’s intel we could use. Mimi, please. You know me. You must know Guerin, at least a bit. Maria trusts him, she trusted him to help you. Isn’t that proof enough?”

Mimi twisted to look at Maria, who met her gaze without speaking. Mimi frowned and touched the pendant around Maria’s neck, then looked over at Alex and beckoned him closer. “Let me see you.”

Alex stepped close, and let her take his hand, folding both of hers around it in a way that was devastatingly familiar. The predictions she’d given him when he’d been a kid had been funny, sweet, usually optimistic, occasionally warning. Mimi turned his hand over to press her fingers to his palm, sighing. “Maria?”

“Yes?”

“Could you lend Alex your necklace? Just for a moment.”

“Sure, Mom.” Maria sounded confused, but at Alex’s nod, she unlooped her necklace and lowered it over Alex’s head. He didn’t feel any different, and Mimi frowned harder, eyes flicking between him and Michael.

“I don’t understand.”

“I couldn’t get in his head even if I wanted to,” Michael said peevishly. “I can’t do that. All I can do is move things. And fix things. Fixed your railing after I broke it, didn’t I? I’ve fixed that damn register more times these last couple years than I wanna count. Got you a new pool cue after that guy snapped it hitting me.”

“God, don’t list everything,” Maria muttered. 

“I’m not some monster just because I’m not from Earth, is the point I’m making,” Michael snapped, and Alex wondered if anyone else could hear the tiny shake in Michael’s voice, like he wasn’t entirely convinced of his own words. “Sometimes your town drunk is from outer space, big deal. Manes might’ve taken my family, okay? Are you gonna help me find them or are you gonna keep wasting my time?”

Mimi hesitated, then lifted the necklace off Alex and settled it around her own neck. He watched, ready to intervene if things went sideways, as she marched over to Michael and held out her hand, palm-up. “Hand,” she said in a hard voice, and when Michael offered her his hand, she shook her head. “No, your left.”

He scowled, but obeyed. She took his wrist and touched the palm of her hand with her fingertips, unfolding his fingers and tracing the lines. “Who did this?” she asked, tapping his mangled fingers, and Michael tensed.

“What makes you think someone did it?” he asked, combative. “Could’ve been a junkyard accident.”

“It wasn’t though. This was a deliberate act.”

“Don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

“You’re the one who came in here with magic hands,” she said in a hard voice Alex had never heard her use before. “Give me a reason to trust you.”

Michael clenched his jaw and snatched his hand away. “Your precious Chief Master Sergeant did it. For daring to touch his precious son.”

Alex couldn’t see Mimi’s face, but he heard her sharp intake of breath, and when she did look over her shoulder at him, her expression was stricken. Alex swallowed and nodded. “When we were seventeen. Mimi…” He licked his lips, organising his thoughts. “Michael went to school with us. He grew up with us. He lives here. He isn’t an invader from a hostile planet, or whatever lies my dad’s told you.”

Mimi turned back to Michael and took his hand again, and even though he looked half ready to bolt, Michael let her. She held it for a long time, pressed between both of hers. Almost a full minute later, she exhaled and let him go, stepping back to give him some space. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Alright.”

“You’ll help us?” Michael asked, wary, and she nodded.

“I’ll…tell you what I can. I don’t trust you, but…I trust my senses. And you don’t feel rotten.”

“Gee, thanks.” Michael’s lip curled. 

“What can you tell us, Mimi?” Alex asked quietly, and she turned to look at him, still keeping Michael in her sights.

“Your dad has a bunker out at the combat installation by the old air base. There are other places, but that’s the closest. If he has taken prisoners, he wouldn’t have taken them there though – that’s just his local base.”

Alex went cold. “How many are there?”

“At least three, maybe as many as five.” Mimi glanced uncertainly at Michael. “The crash in ’47, it yielded a lot of material.”

“How many people are involved?” Alex asked. “Who’s running it?”

“Your father is.” Mimi frowned. “I don’t know how many other people are involved. Jim was.”

“And you.” 

“No.” Mimi shook her head. “Not really. I knew, I’ve always known the crash was real, but the cover-up was government. I’m not involved in any of that.”

“Did my dad know you knew?”

She nodded. “Jimmy was a regular, so your father knew through him. He knew I saw the truth; I wasn’t ever a threat.”

Alex shook his head, but couldn’t refute it, not yet. He glanced at Michael, then back to her. “Okay. I think we should maybe sit down, and I’m going to ask you a lot of questions.”

It wasn’t pretty. 

Mimi, if she wasn’t lying, was an outsider to the whole affair. It was one thing for the government and the military to enlist local law enforcement for extra assistance if they needed it – quite another to involve civilians. And another thing altogether if those civilians were black. “Even if they are gifted,” Mimi said, touching Maria’s hair, and giving Alex a look. “Our family, we’ve always had stronger sensitivity than most.”

She wasn’t the only local who knew that the crash had been real, but they were smart enough to keep their mouths shut, or make a point of going the other way and exaggerating the stories to the point of silliness. She didn’t know how many others there were, but fewer and fewer as the years went by. Her family had lived in the area for a long time, and they knew the dangers that the crash had brought.

Alex kept half an eye on Michael, who was keeping his distance but listening intently as Mimi told them that there had been many aliens on the ship that had crashed, and several of them had escaped. The deaths that resulted had been covered up, but there were always deaths. The otherworldly visitors didn’t speak, only killed. Those that didn’t used humans as puppets and shields. They left handprints on those they murdered, the only outward sign of the cause of death.

They were unnatural. Mimi gave Michael a wary look, but didn’t alter her lines. The effect the aliens had on the energies around them was freakish and frightening. Their very presence could amplify or destroy the supernatural phenomena that life on Earth generated. The aliens carried a dark energy, she insisted. She’d seen it infect Alex’s dad, and Jim Valenti. There was one on the loose now – she didn’t know who, but whoever it was had killed several people. Jim was trying to track it down, but the alien got him before he got it.

“He died of brain cancer,” Maria interjected, frowning. “Not a handprint, or whatever it is.”

Mimi glanced at Michael again, eyes narrow. “They can do these things. Jesse told me, after it happened. He and Jimmy had been arguing, but he never wanted Jim to die. Some of the aliens they captured, they had the most horrifying powers. The worst was the mind invasion, but there were others who could touch a human and stop their heart, twist their insides up, give them terrible diseases – like brain cancer.”

Alex could feel Michael’s restless energy, and asked the question he knew Michael wanted answered. “They captured some of these aliens alive?”

“Oh yes. All gone now, of course, it’s been decades, but the ones that escaped, well.” Mimi pursed her lips, worried. “Jim said…he said it was like rodents. You only need two.”

“Mom!” Maria sounded horrified, and she looked at Michael with wide eyes. Alex didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to know what Michael’s reaction to that was.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Is there anything else you haven’t told us?”

Mimi shook her head, eyes still flicking between him and Michael. “I…I have some questions of my own.”

“Not now.” Alex stood up. “We’re on the clock here. We need to find Michael’s family. Maria can fill you in on anything you’ve missed.” He swallowed and nodded to both women. “Thank you for your help. Call me if you think of anything else.” Finally, he looked at Michael. He looked blank, the way he had just before he’d decided to tell Maria the truth. He didn’t meet Alex’s eyes as he went to the door, leaving without a word. Alex shared a look with Maria before following. 

Michael stalked ahead, and Alex didn’t hurry to keep up. He knew he’d want some time alone to process all of that if he’d been in Michael’s place. But outside, just before they turned the corner, Michael looked over his shoulder at him. Brow pinched, like he wasn’t sure Alex was following.

“I have a separate leg for running, you know,” Alex told him as he drew level and Michael started walking again. “I can go and get us some coffee or something if you want to just sit for a bit?”

“No.” Michael looked at him, something hard in his eyes. “Unless you’re too afraid to be alone with me now?”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Afraid of you?”

“Never tried amplifying a haunt, but I bet I could.” Michael looked forward, jaw tight. “Max can heal, so I guess the inverse of that could involve creating cancer in their cells, right? And Isobel’s one of those mind-rapists she’s so scared of. We’re all monsters.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Alex said, harsher than he meant. Michael snorted and quickened his pace again, and Alex reached out to grab his arm. “Guerin.”

“What happened to _Michael?_” Michael asked sarcastically, letting himself be spun round to face Alex, both of them stopping. The truck was in view, and Alex felt the weight of the huge sky overhead, the staring windows nearby, the potential listening ears. Even with the alien glass against his chest, he felt that, and knew it was all him.

“Michael,” Alex said, and felt like he was physically tearing himself open just by saying it. He swallowed. “Michael, you’re not a monster.”

“Aren’t I?” Michael was twitching, restless and uncomfortable. He looked away and shook his head, sucking his lip between his teeth for a moment. “I’ve done some pretty awful things in my life.”

“Well so have I.” Alex really didn’t want to do this out in the open, but suggesting they move to the truck might push Michael even further away. “Look, my dad is an expert in getting in people’s heads, he manipulates like he breathes. You shouldn’t have had to hear the stuff Mimi was saying.”

“What if it’s true?” Michael’s voice cracked, and Alex swayed towards him. “What if my people did come here to kill?”

“Then they’d fit right in on Earth.” Alex hesitated, then stepped forward and touched Michael’s shoulder. “Look, your existence is proof that aliens aren’t instinctive killers, or whatever bullshit my dad’s been pouring in Mimi’s ear. And she can already see that – she read you, she knows you’re not some sort of dangerous animal.”

Michael shook his head, biting down on his lip so hard it must have hurt, eyes narrow like he didn’t believe a word Alex was saying. 

Alex wanted to shake him, snap him out of it. He took a breath, braced himself, and hugged Michael instead. It took a second, but Michael lifted his arms to hug him back, burying his face in Alex’s shoulder. “You’re not a monster,” he said again. “My dad is a bigoted asshole with a superiority complex who sees threats and violence everywhere, and he likes manipulating people to make himself feel powerful. You’re a good person.”

Michael made a quiet sound of dissent, and Alex squeezed him. “Come on, Guerin. Michael. We’ve got a job to do, let’s do it.”

He felt Michael suck in a deep breath, and wished he didn’t miss his warmth when he let go. “Okay.” Michael rubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s go.” He turned towards the truck, and Alex closed his eyes for just a second before following. It wasn’t Michael’s fault that Alex was infatuated with him.

The combat installation looked like it had been abandoned for longer than Alex had been alive, but his dad’s car wasn’t there. A secondary sweep on foot (which Michael insisted on joining him for) revealed no vehicles either, but did turn up a very out of place handprint scanner lock on the outside of what had to be the bunker entrance. 

“Not what you’d call well-concealed,” Michael muttered, pulling his hat brim down to better shadow his face. “The damn gate is right there.”

“So he’s confident no one’s going to come looking,” Alex said, tracing the outline of the scanner. It was new, recently installed in the last couple of years if the lack of weathering on the casing was any indication, and the casing itself was only secured by a screw at each corner. “Or anyone who does is going to be dealt with.” He straightened and looked around, thinking. 

Michael caught his expression and frowned. “What?”

“Just a hunch.” There were only so many places that would get a good view of anyone entering the bunker, and Alex struck gold on his first check. The bunker entrance was on the outside of a large building that might have once been a mess hall, and there were shrubs and small trees growing against it and the smaller building opposite. Nailed to the trunk of the little tree directly opposite was a little black box. “Smile,” Alex said dryly. “We’re on camera.”

“Shit.” Michael took a step back, out of its view, and then rolled his eyes. “Don’t know why I even did that, it already saw us, right?”

“Right.” Alex ran his fingers over the outside of it like he had the scanner. “These are…reassuring.”

“You’re gonna have to explain that to me.”

“They’re clumsy. This and the scanner.” Alex gestured to it. “They weren’t professionally installed. And anyone with a brain could tell you you don’t want something as delicate as a handprint scanner exposed to nature like this. God knows how he gets in when it snows. It’s like…style over substance, almost.” He looked at Michael. “Can you open the door if the lock’s electric?”

“Never tried.” Michael came over again, looking down at the hatch and squinting. “I could force it,” he said after a second. “It’s a bolt, at the end of the day. It might break the equipment though.”

“Do it.” 

There was a moment’s silence, and then the sound of dragging metal, and a clunk. Michael reached forward and opened one of the hatch doors, revealing a set of concrete steps that descended into darkness. “Creepy.”

“Yeah.” Alex looked over to the truck. “Okay. We need to hide your truck, and I want your gun.”

“My – how’d you know about that?”

Alex had to bite down the instinct to lie. “I looked in the glove box.”

Michael snorted, starting back towards the truck. “Course you did.”

He didn’t seem mad, which was a relief. Alex followed and climbed in as Michael did. “Why do you even have a gun? You have superpowers.”

“Which I can’t use in front of people,” Michael said, turning the engine on.

“Okay, so why do you have an _antique_ gun?” 

Michael laughed as he reversed the truck and turned it to head around the back of the mess hall. “Wow, you want the thing or not? You join the military, you become a gun snob.”

“I’m not a snob,” Alex huffed. “I’m just saying, of all the guns you could have, you’ve got a revolver? Is the cowboy aesthetic that important to you?”

Michael snorted, shaking his head. “I won it, since you’re so interested. I didn’t go out and buy it myself.”

“Who’d you win it off?”

“Wyatt Long.” Michael grinned, crooked and sly. “There’s a guy who’s committed to the cowboy aesthetic. He hates I’ve got one of his guns, so I hung onto it outta spite. What’ve you got against revolvers anyway?”

“Low capacity.” Alex shrugged. “Nothing big, I just prefer pistols.”

“But you still want mine?”

“Anything’s better than nothing.”

“Help yourself, shade. How come you don’t have one of your own?”

“Did for a while.” Alex opened the glove box and took the gun out, checking the chamber, and taking the box of cartridges too. “But it felt kind of excessive, when I started training to be a shade. I wanted to make a clean break too, in a way,” he added, something in the tilt of Michael’s head encouraging an uncharacteristic burst of honesty. “Leave that part of my life behind me, as much as I could.”

“Did it help?”

“I don’t know.” Alex looked down at the revolver, heavy in his hands. “It’s hard to leave behind something I spent a decade doing.” He cleared his throat. “Behind here should be fine.” He nodded to the row of buildings they were approaching.

“You’re the boss.”

Alex frowned. He waited until he knew how he wanted to phrase it, which meant they were at the top of the stairs before he said, “I’m not the boss.”

“No?” Michael handed him a flashlight and got his phone out to use the light on that. 

“No. Shades are meant to work in pairs, both equal.”

“I’m not a shade,” Michael said, and Alex rolled his eyes.

“You’re still a shade even if you’re not licenced, I’ve told you.”

“Yeah, well. I still reckon you’re a bit more qualified for this than me.” Michael nodded down into the dark. “But I’ll go first if you want.”

“No.” Alex sighed. “It’s probably fine, but stay behind me just in case.”

“Maybe I’ve changed my mind,” Michael said airily as Alex started to walk carefully down the steps, flashlight in one hand and uncocked gun in the other. “Maybe I should go first, what with my superpowers and all.”

“Can you make a shield? Can you stop bullets?” The stairway went down further than Alex had expected, and there were lights along the walls that he assumed would have turned on if they’d actually used the handprint scanner. 

“No to the shields, though I can kinda send out energy blasts? I can knock stuff back, could definitely knock a person off their feet. Never tried it on anything heavier than a table. Max…when we were kids, I tried stopping BB pellets, and I had about a ten, twenty percent success rate. Never managed to stop any real bullets – they just move too fast.”

Twenty-three steps until they reached a tall concrete corridor. Alex swept the light around, focused. The corridor wasn’t long, maybe twenty feet at most. There was a large double door at the end of it, and two smaller doors along the right side of the corridor. All metal, all old. 

“Well until you can stop bullets, you should stay behind me,” Alex murmured. “Are any of these doors locked?”

Michael paused. “No. Want me to open them?”

“One at a time. The one closest first.”

It swung open smoothly, and Alex had to repress the part of his brain that saw a door open on its own and thought _haunt_. 

He pointed the flashlight in and swept it once quickly, then again, slower. Metal filing shelves stood either side of the door, filled with boxes. Alex stepped in and swept the light through again. The back of the room was further away than he’d expected, and through the gaps in the boxes he could see that the room extended back towards the stairs a fair distance too. And every available square inch was filled with shelves and shelves of boxes, from floor to ceiling. He could tell that the space between shelving units was as narrow as physically possible, and his nose was already itching from the dust.

“Thrilling,” Michael whispered from behind him.

“What’s in those boxes might be.” Alex backed out slowly, and nodded to the next door as he closed the one to the storage room.

The next door opened onto a short corridor with a very small dormitory at the end and a small, ugly bathroom to the side. Three sets of ancient looking bunk beds were in there, five of them stripped bare, one made up. Alex smelled a faint echo of his dad’s aftershave and backed out quicker than necessary.

The double doors opened into a much larger room. Alex breathed out as his flashlight swept it once, twice, again, slower each time. Michael edged into the room as he took a careful step forward, and said, “There’s a light switch here, y’know.”

“Hit it.”

The lights were cold, blue-toned. Not what he’d expected from such an obviously old installation, but maybe his dad had updated them like he’d obviously updated the security system. There was a large sunken area in the centre of the chamber with a conference table and comfortable-looking chairs around it. Paperwork everywhere. Metal filing cabinets along the walls. Glass barriers along the edges of the sunken part. A large computer array set up at the far end, with a stupid number of screens suspended at angles that made Alex grimace. 

“Now what?” Michael asked.

“With your telekinesis, would you be able to tell if there was someone else in here?”

“Maybe.” Michael stepped up next to him, and for a moment Alex swore he felt _something_ move through the air around him. It raised the hairs on the backs of his arms and sent a tiny wave of dizziness through his head. “Nothing I can sense,” Michael said after a second. “Just a lotta blunt objects.”

“Okay.” Alex clicked the flashlight off and gave the room another once-over. “Go back and close the main hatch. You can look through the paperwork while I work on the computer.”

Michael went back up the corridor without another word, and Alex headed over to the computer array, going through the sunken part so he could give the papers on the table a quick look. He didn’t make it past the first folder before Michael was back. “You want me to try hacking instead?” he asked dryly.

“Mimi wasn’t lying about the murders.” Alex lifted up what was unmistakably a police report. “Alice Hernandez, found in a ditch just two months ago.”

“How do you know it was an alien?” Michael frowned, coming down the steps to join him. Alex put the report on the table and opened it to show him the photograph of the body, a handprint on the young woman’s shoulder glowing brightly. 

“I’d say that’s a pretty good indication.” He watched Michael’s expression, part of him cataloguing his wide eyes and slack mouth with relief. Michael hadn’t known. Michael’s bad hand trembled slightly as he touched the edge of the photo.

“I know her.”

That was unexpected. Alex blinked. “You do?”

“Yeah. Called herself Allie. Hung out at the Pony with Maria – not our Maria, Maria…Garcia’s her last name, I think. Our Maria didn’t like her in the bar, but she lets in everyone on Ranchero Night.”

Alex went still, remembering what Maria had told him about Noah’s firm working to help people on Ranchero. “Mimi’s waifs and strays event?”

“Yeah, twice a month. I don’t usually go – Hank’s band plays for free, and they’re terrible – but I remember her hanging around.” He sounded bewildered again, and Alex licked his lips before taking the plunge.

“Maria told me Noah goes to these events sometimes, remember? His law firm offers assistance to the undocumented.”

Michael nodded, then frowned at him. “Wait, not – look, this isn’t, it isn’t Noah.”

Alex didn’t want to argue it, and just touched their shoulders together for a second. “Okay. You’d better start sorting through all this.”

Michael straightened and nodded again, and Alex gripped his shoulder before heading up the steps to the computer. The chair, when he sat in it, smelled like his dad. The idiotic urge to replace it with one of the chairs from the conference table pressed at him until he shoved it down, practicality winning out. He tuned Michael out and started to type. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get in. He realised a few minutes later that he was smiling, small but irrepressible. His dad had messed up. That was what it came down to. Jesse Manes had _screwed up_, and Alex was taking advantage of that.

If he started thinking about the possibility of getting caught, he would get anxious, so he didn’t think about it. He concentrated on breaking in instead, and allowed himself a grin when he managed it. There was a surface level that was accessible from that point, and he ignored that in favour of checking what was encrypted, which was pretty much everything else.

“Find anything?” he asked without looking round.

“More police reports.” Michael’s answer was quiet. “A map.”

“Anything on the map?”

“Our cave.” Michael’s exhale was shaky. “He took our fucking pods.”

“We knew this,” Alex reminded him, setting up a programme to run and turning around with a frown.

“S’different seeing proof.” Michael was glaring at the table, which looked even more of a mess than before.

“If we can get your pods back, we will. But Max, Isobel, and Noah are the priority.”

“I know that.” Michael snapped, then grimaced. “You found anything yet?”

“Not yet, but my dad’s encryption sucks.” Alex let a note of smugness slip into his voice, hoping to lighten the mood a bit. It worked – Michael looked at him with a smirk playing at his own lips.

“Yeah?”

“It’s old, and flimsy at best. It’s like the handprint scanner at the entrance. There’s no point in buying fancy tech if you don’t know how to utilise it properly.”

“You’re gonna crack this in like, five minutes, is what I’m hearing.”

“Well.” Alex made a show of looking behind himself to where his programme was running. “Maybe six.” Michael snorted, and Alex smiled at him. “Keep sorting the files, I’ll start reading what I’ve got access to already.”

“You want me to read this shit aloud, or…?”

“No. Absorb, then summarise when you’ve gotten through it all. Don’t read it properly, just skim. The faster we go, the more we’ll get.”

“Got it.” 

Alex turned back to the computer and got to work properly. He’d talked it up a little for Michael: it would take more like fifteen to twenty minutes to crack the encryption, but there was plenty he could do in the meantime. The unprotected files would still be plenty informative.

If there were multiple sites, there had to be multiple people involved, but Alex couldn’t find evidence of anyone more than his dad, who appeared to run everything from this bunker. The documents he had immediate access to gave him a name – Project Shepherd – and a weird paper trail. When he realised, he couldn’t stop himself from closing his eyes and breathing out for a moment in pure delight.

“What?” 

Alex took a deep breath in and composed himself. “Project Shepherd, this whole operation? It was officially shut down in 2010.”

“I take it that’s a good thing?” Michael didn’t sound anywhere near as cheerful as Alex felt, and he turned around to look at him. He’d sorted some of the papers into piles and was sprawled in one of the chairs with two paper folders open in front of him. There was another autopsy photo there, another body Alex didn’t recognise. It sobered him up quickly.

“It’s a very good thing.” He glanced over his shoulder at the documents on the screens. “It makes sense. This operation’s been running since 1947, and its original purpose was containment and cover-up. The need for both of those dwindled the further from the incident the world got. 2009; that’s when Obama got in. Funding got cut for this a year later, they probably figured it was an unnecessary expense. Mimi talked about escaped aliens, but who knows how much truth is in that? It must have been quiet for a long time; they must’ve figured the project had run its course.”

“Lotta _must have’s_ there.” 

“I’m nearly in.” Alex tipped his head back in the direction of the screens. “I’ll know for sure then. You got anything interesting yet?”

“If by interesting you mean more deaths, yeah.” Michael lifted up the photo. “This guy is Winston Booth. Didn’t know his name, but he’s another guy I recognise, another addict. There’s five more too. _Five._ All people who wouldn’t be missed.” Michael threw the photo down and looked away, tense. “Handprints on all of them.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. If Michael had been a fellow airman, it would have been different, but Alex couldn’t think of a single thing that would make the silence any less awful. 

“There has to be someone else,” Michael muttered. “It can’t be Noah.”

“Can’t it?” Alex wished he hadn’t said it instantly, when Michael got to his feet with a scrape of the chair against the concrete floor, shoving himself away from the table and pacing to the opposite end of the sunken space. 

“You don’t get it,” he said, turning on his heel to glare at Alex. “You don’t, he’s not a killer. The guy can’t even hang a picture. He hates living in an open carry state. He, he puts spiders under a freaking cup to take them outside, because he doesn’t wanna pick ‘em up, but he doesn’t wanna kill ‘em either. He’s not capable of something like this.” He gestured expansively to the autopsy photograph. 

“You know him better than I do.” Alex hesitated. “I think you should look through some of the filing cabinets in here.”

“Why?”

Maybe blunt was the best approach. “Because looking at those is freaking you out, and it isn’t helpful.” 

Michael clenched his jaw and looked away, but then nodded. “Alright. Yeah. Okay. Tell me when you get past his firewall or whatever.”

“I will.” Alex watched as Michael jumped up the steps and stalked over to the nearest cabinet, wrenching the top drawer open. Behind him, the computer made a soft sound, and he turned around to see the lovely sight of an _Access Granted_ box glowing red on the lowest righthand screen. “I’m in,” he told Michael, spinning back around. “I’ll keep you updated.”

Alex was good at not thinking about things. He was an expert in repression and the lock-it-in-a-box method of dealing with his feelings. So he’d easily ignored the fact that his family had been involved in the UFO cover-up right from the beginning, and compartmentalised his feelings about that, locking them down until they weren’t even there.

It was hard to keep a lid on it when confronted with decades’ worth of data detailing his family’s work though. 

Alex had been to war. He’d been on multiple tours, he’d killed people, he’d seen and participated in horrific acts. When he found the first photographs, for a second all he saw were the uniforms. Then he realised what the men wearing them were doing, and minimised every window as fast as he could.

“What was that?”

Either not fast enough, or so fast it had been noticeable. He didn’t turn around. “What?”

“What was that?” Michael repeated, coming up the steps behind him. Alex could see his reflection in a couple of the screens. “Were those photos?”

Alex sighed and spun the chair around slowly to face him. “Yes.”

“Why are you hiding them?”

“Because I don’t think you should look at them right now.” 

Michael visibly bristled. Alex understood – he would have done exactly the same if their positions were reversed. “Show me.”

“Guerin…” Alex scrambled to figure out how to phrase what he needed to put across, and Michael scowled.

“You don’t get to decide what I do or don’t see in here, Alex.”

“I know. And I’m not trying to keep them from you, but I just…they’re war crimes.” He had to force himself to meet Michael’s eyes. “You shouldn’t be looking at them right now, not like this.”

“Why not?” Michael snapped his hand back to gesture to the table, and Alex froze to stop himself flinching, his heart rate kicking into overdrive. It was just his father’s presence in this place, he told himself. It was the smell of his aftershave on the chair, and his favourite brand of pen in the pot on the desk. Michael would never hit him. 

“Because I wouldn’t show pictures like this to someone in your situation without going through proper procedure,” he heard himself say. 

“There’s a procedure for this?” Michael’s voice could have cut glass.

Alex took a slow breath in. There wasn’t time to count and breathe more. “It’s highly likely that you had family members on that ship, Guerin. I don’t want –”

“I don’t care what you want!” Michael snapped. “You think I haven’t thought about that? You think I don’t wanna see the people who might be related to me?”

“You don’t want to see them like this!” Alex fought to keep his voice level, but didn’t quite manage it. Another breath, and he had to look down. “Their faces are covered. They’re laid out on those tables like slabs of meat. I’m not…I’m not saying don’t look at them ever, just not now, okay?”

“You think I might cry?” Michael sneered. “They’re my people! What makes it okay that you get to look and I don’t?”

“I’m not going to! Jesus, Guerin.” Alex glared at him, then looked up at the ceiling. “Look, don’t…don’t bite my head off, but this isn’t the time. These people have been dead for decades. Your family, Max and Isobel and Noah, they’re the ones we need to focus on right now.”

Michael looked furious, lips thin with anger. But Alex waited, stone-still and as unthreatening as he could look, and he eventually looked back at the conference table. “You won’t look,” he said in a low voice.

“No.”

“You swear?”

“Yeah.” Alex swallowed. “I promise. Look, I’m gonna set up a file transfer, and I’ll send them to my laptop. I’ll put them on a drive or something when we get back to your trailer, and you can have them.”

“Transfer everything,” Michael said, his voice hard. “I want everything your dad has.”

Alex nodded, a tiny jerk of his head. “Okay.” Michael nodded and went back down the steps to the conference table, and Alex closed the windows he’d opened without maximising them on the screen again, Michael’s words replaying in his head. _I want everything your dad has._ Alex’s dad. Alex’s family.

The awful things he’d been part of during his service hadn’t been connected to his family like this. His mom had once talked about generational pain in one of the rare phone calls he’d had with her, the phone finally passed from Flint to him, his dad looming in the background, waiting blank-faced for the allotted time to run out. Every call had to be on speaker. He couldn’t remember ever getting to speak privately with her as a kid. She’d told him that she carried the pain of her ancestors in her bones, and he carried it in his as well. 

He remembered his dad’s lip curling, remembered trying to stay on his good side by saying something like, “Only half.” Remembered the intense shame of rejecting her.

_Your dad._

For Michael, Alex was always going to be tied up in this now. As if his dad hadn’t done enough damage, as if he wasn’t already a spectre looming over their relationship – if they even had a relationship. Could what they had be called a relationship?

Alex locked it away and focused on the job. He could deal with his own issues later, at a more convenient time. He pressed the alien glass against his chest and started transferring files, opening others and skimming the contents as fast as he could, going for the most recent stuff now rather than trying to contextualise it with the past.

His father had always been obsessed with catching Alex and his brothers in the act of anything disobedient they were doing, and they’d all joked and complained about the possibility of hidden cameras and bugs. Alex started to wonder now whether his dad really had bugged their house when they were kids – he was clearly capable of it. He had Max’s, and Isobel and Noah’s houses under surveillance. All three of them had files that listed them as red-level threats to national security.

Alex checked for Michael’s name before he went any further, and had to make himself count his breaths as he read on. Michael had been designated a threat level of red as well, but there was a note that recommended lowering the level to amber, for no reason Alex could immediately see, but could easily guess. If his dad thought he’d caught Roswell’s alien trio, after all, why keep investigating Michael?

He’d never managed to get any good surveillance footage of Michael, it seemed. There were some old, bad-quality photographs, but no videos. Michael had no fixed address, and hadn’t since 2010, when Alex assumed he’d bought his trailer. The address of the trailer ping-ponged around between two different trailer parks, Sanders’ Auto Repairs, the Foster Ranch, and a few other addresses Alex didn’t recognise. There were lots of blank spots and question marks too, and even though Michael was in the room with him, Alex couldn’t help feeling relieved, and oddly proud. 

Max and Isobel – and Noah when he’d appeared in Roswell – had been easy to track and trace. Michael had been much harder for his dad to hunt, and it had probably saved his life. 

He checked for Maria and Mimi next, his relief increasing when he saw their threat levels were listed as green and yellow respectively. Both files were short, Maria’s shorter than Mimi’s, which had a note that mentioned that she knew of the existence of aliens but held no conflicting views to Project Shepherd’s essential role.

Somewhat reassured, Alex went back to Max, Isobel, and Noah’s files, and started to read. His dad’s notes were poor, obviously the result of having no one to read them but himself. They were short, referencing things that were abbreviated or in acronyms so Alex didn’t know what they were. They hadn’t been updated since August 15th, two days before Michael had even left Roswell.

There was one promising note though – _Transfer to C or PV?_

Alex spun the chair around, and refocused on Michael. 

The conference table was covered in boxes and piles of paper. Michael was going through them with impressive speed, flicking through files without pause and setting them aside on one pile or another. He obviously had a system, and Alex wished there was time for him to ask about it, or to just sit back and watch Michael at work. 

He cleared his throat. “Found anything?”

“Not much.” Michael didn’t look up, still flicking through the papers in his hand. “Lotta records that don’t tell me anything useful, other than that this used to be a way bigger operation. Used to be a lot of money in this, and a lot of people, and equipment.”

“Equipment?”

“Military vehicles and black sites, mostly. Used to be based at the old Roswell Air Base, and split off into satellite sites when that was shut down. A lot of the early stuff is censored to shit, black pen all over the place.” His nose wrinkled in irritation. He slid the papers he’d been holding back into their paper folder and put them neatly on a pile to his left before picking up another. “No mention of captives yet, but I’ve been thinking about the way they phrase things when they’re talking about the material they recovered from the site.”

Alex accepted that like a blow. “Dehumanising your enemy is the best way to get people to perform inhumane acts on them.”

“Is it dehumanising if we aren’t human?” Michael asked, deceptively casual. Flicking through his next folder, he didn’t see Alex clench his fists on the arms of the chair. “They split the _material_ up all over the place, even before Roswell Air Base closed. So if one site was compromised, the others would still function, I guess, and in case the commies invaded.” He snorted. “They’re cagey about defining what material they’re talking about, even in these reports.”

“Makes sense.”

“Mm. They got a lot more interested in the haunt-related stuff when your grandpa took over. Jackson Manes, right? Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, by the time he retired. Long title for what looks like a short guy. Your dad’s got a lot to live up to. He’s only, what, a Chief Master Sergeant, no Air Force extras attached? How many ranks difference is that?”

Alex had to swallow before he could answer. “Two. They’re both…they’re both an E-9 though.”

“What were you again?”

“Captain. O-3.”

“So you outranked all your predecessors.” Michael cut a smirk in his direction. “Bet your dad hates that.”

“I’ve never asked him about it.”

“Mm.” Michael looked down at the papers again, flicked through to the end, and set them on the same pile as the others. He picked up another and started going through that as well.

“What’re you looking for?”

“Anything about locations that isn’t censored.”

“Have you found anything with a C or a P and a V in the name?”

Michael’s head snapped up. “Why?”

“My dad has files for Max, Isobel, and Noah. He mentioned the possibility of transfer to either C or PV on Isobel’s. I don’t know what either of them could be.”

“PV is Penvale.” Michael put the folder he’d picked up back on the table, eyes wide. “Has to be.”

“What’s Penvale?”

“Name of the facility they moved some of the original material to.” Michael started shuffling through one of the piles of folders to his left. “One of these, gimme a second. They renamed it at some point and censored that, but remember the shacks at middle school?”

Alex frowned. “What about them?” The shacks were two classrooms that had probably been intended to be temporary when they were first installed, but they’d been there as long as Alex had been a student, and he knew from his brothers that they’d been there long before he’d arrived too.

“They weren’t actually called that. They were called…I don’t know, I don’t even remember. But the school didn’t actually call them the _shacks_. But people find a name for a thing and stick with it.”

“Right,” Alex said, understanding.

“I bet you ten dollars that if we searched for Penvale on maps from the 1940’s, we’d find it,” Michael said, and Alex nodded. 

“You find any maps?”

“Don’t need to.” Michael gave him a humourless smile. “I’ve got about three from that era back at my trailer.”

Of course.

Michael nodded at the screens behind Alex. “You got anything else out of that?”

“Yeah. Lots.” Alex licked his lips. “I haven’t had time to look at most of it, but it’s pretty damning. For my dad, I mean. The fact that this isn’t an official operation means he must be running it with his own money.”

“I’m guessing that’s really, really illegal.”

“A dishonourable discharge would just be the start of the consequences he’d face. But we can’t just turn him in.”

“Because the government knows aliens are real,” Michael said darkly. “And all he’d have to do is tell them he’s got two locked up.”

“That’s another thing.” Alex got up and walked slowly down to the conference table. “He’s keeping all this quiet, even when he has proof. Where were those autopsies?”

“Uh.” Michael’s eyes flicked rapidly over the table. “Somewhere in there.”

Alex couldn’t blame him for not wanting to look at them again. “You remember when the first one was?”

“2009.”

Alex nodded. “I thought so.”

“Why’d you think so?” Michael frowned.

“I figured it had to go back to before the project was shut down, by the way Mimi was talking about it. Are you sure there weren’t any before that?”

Michael nodded quickly. “None I found.”

Too fast. Alex just nodded in return. “Either way, there’s no way this project should have been shut down if someone had been killed by an obviously alien source of power.”

“So why was it?”

“My guess…my dad was holding it back for some reason. He likes hoarding information. Maybe this time it backfired – he didn’t see the shutdown decision coming, and he’d already held the information back too long by then. Holding something like that back at all would have been really bad for him. There must have been other factors at play though.”

“Must have,” Michael repeated flatly. “Still too much we don’t know.”

“It isn’t important for now.” Alex looked behind him at the screens, then checked his watch. “We can’t leave all this out.”

“So we’ll take it with us.” Michael straightened. “I’ll load up my truck, we’ll make a couple trips, put it all at mine.”

“More than a couple.” Alex looked past him, towards the hallway. “If we’re going to take some of it, we should take all of it, including everything in that storage room back there. I’ll start downloading everything off this computer. Can you bring the truck round? And bring my bag down when you come back, there’s a hard drive in there I can start backing some of this onto.”

Michael’s lingering look at the table wasn’t subtle, but he nodded. “I’ll be two minutes,” he said, and headed out of the room, getting his phone out to use the flashlight.

Alex waited until he heard Michael head up the stairs at the other end of the corridor, and then went straight for the table, determined to find the autopsies. It was a stupid suspicion, but he couldn’t quite shake it. If there was anything in there that indicated Noah for sure, Alex wanted to know that going in. A rescue operation with a potentially hostile captive could be a disaster.

He found the autopsy folders quickly. He was in no way prepared to find Rosa Ortecho in the bottommost folder, a black and white photograph of her body with a dark handprint stamped across her mouth right there when he opened it.

Alex sat down in the nearest chair and read the whole thing, then read it again. He was staring at the photograph when Michael came back down into the bunker.

“Truck’s outside, I got your bag and a bottle of water too, because it’s dry as a fucking tomb down here and I…” Silence. Alex kept staring at Rosa’s photograph, her open eyes and the tangled hair visible at the edges of the frame. The dirt on her face. The smear of what he assumed was blood on her forehead. “Alex…”

“You were hiding this.” Alex couldn’t tear his eyes away. He’d never been able to remember for sure when the last time he’d seen Rosa had been. Either at the Crashdown or around school. It was the way of things, he figured, when you lost someone who had that sort of place in your life. He and Rosa had been friends, close enough that being in her company wasn’t a special event to be remembered.

He’d never expected her to have a case number and a confidential folder in an alien-related conspiracy. She would have loved it.

“I know you were friends. I didn’t…I know it sounds really hypocritical of me, considering the photos you tried to hide from me, but I didn’t want you to see her like that.”

Alex wished he hadn’t seen it, that was for sure. He still couldn’t tear his eyes away. Michael had to come over and take it gently from his hands. “Come on,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t do anything with that computer. I need you.”

Did he even know what those words did to Alex? He kind of hoped not, because if he did, it was manipulative as hell.

“You don’t seem surprised,” he said evenly, looking up at Michael. It was like the photograph was burned into his eyes, like an afterimage of a bright light. Rosa’s open mouth, her teeth just visible below her upper lip. The darkness of the handprint. Her heavily lidded eyes, staring sightlessly into the camera lens. The mole at the corner of her eye had been in shadow, hidden. Alex wondered whether the darkness around her eyes had been dirt, or soot, or just her eye makeup. 

Michael closed the folder and put it on the table. “I saw it before you did.”

“You don’t have questions?” Alex stood up. “Rosa died in a _car crash._ There were two other girls with her – why aren’t Jasmine and Kate in these files? If Rosa was killed by an alien, what happened to them? They were all in the car together, what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know!” Michael backed up a step, hands flying into the air. “How the hell should I know?”

“These other deaths…” Alex gestured to the folders. “These people were hunted, they were _selected._ Illegal immigrants and addicts and homeless people – the ones no one would miss if they disappeared. Rosa, Kate, and Jasmine? They don’t fit that pattern, and they’re the earliest. They were personal.”

His mind was racing, and he couldn’t help noticing the way Michael had leaned away again, putting more distance between them. Panicking. He knew something.

“Max leaves handprints on people when he heals,” Alex said. “You told me that. Makes sense he’d leave the same mark if he killed.”

“_No._” Michael’s eyes were wide. “No, Alex, it wasn’t Max, you’ve got it all wrong, Max would never hurt anyone.”

“I’ve got it wrong?” Alex’s heart was racing. “I thought you said you didn’t know? How would you know if I’m wrong, Guerin?”

“I…”

“More secrets.” Alex reached past him to grab Rosa’s file again and opened it to her photograph. “She was my friend, Guerin! She was one of the only decent people in this shitheap of a town, and people treated her like dirt after she died. If you know anything, you’d better tell me right now.” He knew he could sound scary when he wanted, and he was torn between satisfaction and self-disgust at the way Michael flinched from his tone.

Michael looked down at Rosa’s photograph and then turned away, pacing to the edge of the pit and rubbing both hands over his face. Alex waited. Silence was always more effective at getting people to talk.

“It wasn’t Max.” Michael turned around, jaw set. “It was me.”

“You’re a liar.” Alex’s chest hurt, his throat tight for some stupid reason. “Look at that photo, Guerin. That’s a left-handed handprint, and I know what happened to your hand that night.”

Michael’s eyes were shining as he glanced, panicked, at the photo on the table. “I, it wasn’t –”

“It was Isobel.”

“_No!_” But his tone was different to when he’d denied it could be Max. That had been certain, this was frightened.

“Isobel killed Rosa.” Alex looked at the photo again and nodded to himself. The handprint did look a little smaller than the others, though the black and white image made it difficult to tell for sure. “Did she kill Kate and Jasmine too? Why weren’t there handprints on them?”

“She didn’t!” Michael’s voice cracked, and he swallowed before he spoke again. “Look, it’s not what you think, okay? It wasn’t her, you have to believe me. She didn’t – she wasn’t herself.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I saw it happen.” Michael stepped forward, pleading. “I saw her, and afterwards, she looked right at me and it _wasn’t her._ I know my sister, Alex, I know her better than anyone apart from Max, and that wasn’t her, it was like she was a different person, like she was possessed.”

People could imagine all sorts of things to excuse their loved ones of terrible actions. And Michael had already told him that their alien biology made possession impossible. Alex shook his head, and Michael’s expression turned resolute.

“Listen, you have to believe me.”

“Do I?” Alex hated the way his voice shook, hated the tell, but he couldn’t help it. Rosa had never treated him like a joke, or the annoying tag-along to their otherwise all-girl friend group. 

He hadn’t heard about Rosa’s death until two days after it had happened. She’d died the night his dad had caught him with Michael, and part of his punishment from that had included complete isolation. He’d been permitted to go to school on Monday, and he’d had to find out from Maria then. She’d been a mess, furious and grieving. She knew that any time he went quiet was always because of a punishment, and she knew never to try to come to his house, but she’d still been upset by his silence.

Rosa’s death had eclipsed any thoughts he’d been having about telling Maria what had happened. Liz hadn’t even come to school. Alex had been glad. He hadn’t wanted her to hear the things people were saying about Rosa. Maria got suspended for hitting Tara Bryant in the face after she said Rosa had deserved to die. Alex’s memories from that time were pretty patchy, but he definitely remembered Michael’s absence at school that week. He couldn’t remember whether Max and Isobel had been around.

Michael’s breath rattled on a heavy exhale. “It wasn’t her, okay? She wasn’t herself; her blackouts were getting worse and she was freaking out about me and Max leaving her alone after graduation. She didn’t even know Rosa! Isobel had no reason to kill her.”

“Blackouts?” Alex repeated, thinking of all the other victims. “You mean she doesn’t even remember doing it?”

Michael shook his head. “She hasn’t had any blackouts since then, I swear. We made sure, me and Max, we stuck to her like glue, and it never happened again.”

“You covered this up for her.” Alex swallowed around the lump in his throat. “You let her get away with it.”

“We had to!” Michael’s hands grasped at empty air. “We had to keep her safe, we have to stay hidden. It’s jail for a human if they murder someone – it’s dissection for us. And it wasn’t her, Alex, it wasn’t her fault, she doesn’t know. She has a good life, she’s happy!”

“At Rosa’s expense!” Alex exploded, furious. “Is Isobel’s _good life_ worth it because Rosa was worth less than her?”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“They said she deserved it!” Alex tried to lower his voice, but it was hard when he was so angry, outraged on Rosa’s behalf. “Everyone in this town said she was junkie trash who killed two innocent girls, and they said she deserved to die! They said she never should’ve been born at all, or she should’ve been deported! Liz skipped town before her own sister’s funeral! _Fuck_ Isobel’s good life! Rosa didn’t deserve this!”

Michael said nothing. He lowered his eyes and accepted every word. Alex glared at him, and looked at the photo of Rosa again. Murdered by an alien. She’d always joked she wanted to live fast and die young, and only after she’d actually died had Alex wished he’d told her no one wanted that for her. She’d deserved better. She’d deserved to fucking live.

“What does Isobel think happened?” he asked in a low, hard voice. “Does she know any of it?”

Michael’s shoulders shifted, and he looked to the side. “She thinks I did it,” he said quietly. “She woke up while Max and I were moving the bodies, and she didn’t remember anything. I told her I got in a fight and busted my hand, and I got drunk and lost control of my powers.”

“And she didn’t question that at all?” Alex asked, incredulous. He didn’t miss the way Michael clenched his jaw, eyes flicking away, body tilting back slightly.

“Never gave her a reason to,” he muttered. “The bodies were there. Why would I lie, right? It was better that way. It wasn’t her; she didn’t need to carry that guilt.”

“Do you even hear yourself right now?”

“Better me than her,” Michael snapped, glaring at him. “She and Max have their shit together. They’ve got homes, parents who love them, Iz has Noah. Rosa and Jasmine and Kate were dead. We did what we had to do to keep each other safe. It wasn’t her fault, Alex. She’s not a killer.”

“She had no problem believing you were though, huh?” Alex said, vicious, and watched the blow land as Michael looked away. “You let your life go to shit to convince her of your guilt, or was that a natural slide?”

“I am guilty,” Michael bit out. “You think I don’t know that? Max too. We messed up, but we had to keep the secret. That has to come first, it always does. We always knew what would happen if people found out what we are.” He gestured around them to the grim concrete of the bunker they were standing in. “It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what was screwing with Isobel’s brain, but it _wasn’t her_ who killed Rosa. And I get it if you don’t want to do this anymore,” he added, chest heaving. “You can go, I’m not holding you to anything. Just don’t…please don’t tell anyone what we are. I need to find them. Please.”

Alex had worked for a long time to become a man of logic rather than emotion. He was still so angry he wasn’t sure he could speak without going on the attack, and he did want to leave Michael to it. He wanted to tear off the alien glass pendant and throw it in his face, wanted to get out of Roswell in the first available vehicle he found. He wanted to find Liz, wherever she was, and tell her and Maria the truth about Rosa’s death.

But he knew that while he did that, Michael wouldn’t stop. He would almost certainly get himself caught, and probably experimented on and killed, just like he was so afraid of. And meanwhile, Roswell would get even more haunted, with only the DeLucas and maybe Kyle able to see the truth of what was going on.

Kyle. God, he wanted to tell Kyle the truth too. Liz wasn’t the only one who’d lost a sister to whatever alien killing spree Isobel had started on back in high school. And even if Kyle had been a dick and Alex still didn’t like or trust him, he deserved to know the truth about Rosa’s death as much as the rest of her family.

Alex breathed out and reached for Rosa’s folder, and the other autopsies. Michael watched in silence as Alex arranged them in a line along the table, the first five open and the rest in a pile at the end. The handprint was definitely smaller on Rosa’s body than any of the others – Rosa had been Isobel’s only victim. So who was the other killer? Max or Noah. Or Michael.

Not Michael. He’d only been worried about concealing Rosa’s death from Alex, not the others. And there were more left-handed handprints on the other bodies, the ring and pinkie fingers clearly defined and unbroken. 

Max or Noah then. Most likely Max, since the murders had begun before Noah’s appearance in Roswell, though Noah’s false identity made that impossible to verify. And Noah was the one who’d been confirmed as an attendee at Ranchero Nights, so who could say?

“Tell me about Isobel’s blackouts,” Alex said without looking up from the files.

Michael cleared his throat. “What d’you wanna know?”

“When did they start?”

“When we were fourteen.”

“Why?”

Michael sighed, and out of the corner of his eye Alex saw him lean back against the glass panel behind him. “The three of us were camping in the desert, and a drifter attacked her while she was out of the tent.”

Despite everything, Alex felt a prick of horror on Isobel’s behalf. “Was she okay?”

Michael shook his head. “He didn’t hurt her, not physically. He dragged her away, we heard her screaming, and we got to her before he could do anything.”

“What about the attacker?”

“He.” Michael sighed again, lowering his head into his hands for a moment. “He had a knife,” he muttered, dropping his arms to his sides and looking away. “I got him off Isobel, but he attacked Max, and Max…Max didn’t even know he could do it, he didn’t mean to, he just wanted to make the guy stop. He cut Max’s neck, he could’ve killed him.”

Jesus Christ. “So Max killed him?”

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Michael said quietly. “He didn’t even know he could heal, then. He reacted, that’s all. Isobel was…it was like she was lost in her own head, she didn’t even turn around while it was happening. I buried the body. With my powers.” He took a deep breath. “She had blackouts after that, on and off. They flared up when she was stressed or scared. You could kind of…there was a time James Capper tried to hug her from behind and she was gone for like, the whole afternoon. Max said it happened when they watched West Side Story with their parents.”

“West Side Story?”

“Apparently there’s a scene where one of the women gets tossed about between a load of the men?” Michael looked incredibly uncomfortable. “I’ve never watched it. But like, when she was having an episode, she wouldn’t…she wouldn’t be there, y’know? It’s like she went away someplace else. The real Isobel, she’d never kill anyone. And they haven’t happened since then, like I said.”

“You aren’t with her every hour of the day,” Alex said. “You can’t know that for sure.”

“I can,” Michael insisted, and pointed to the folders Alex had opened on the table. “The first few years after high school, we were with her at all times, or we made sure she was with someone else.”

Alex looked at the files, the photo of Rosa staring up at him with empty eyes. “That doesn’t change this. Isobel killed Rosa.”

“It wasn’t her! Please, Alex, you’ve got to believe me, it wasn’t Isobel.”

“I can’t believe anything you say.” Alex didn’t look at him. “You love her too much to see any of this with a clear head.”

“Then go.” Michael’s voice shook. “If you don’t believe me, go. I’m not keeping you here.”

“I don’t need to believe you to stay.” The words came before he could stop them, and he didn’t want to take them back once they’d escaped. Michael, when he looked, was staring at him.

“You’re gonna stay?”

“I said I’d help you find them. And I want to hear Isobel’s side of this.”

“She doesn’t know, I told you.” 

“Well you’re telling her,” Alex snapped. “We’re finding them, getting them out, and then we’re dealing with this. No more secrets, no more lies. Rosa deserves better than this.”

Michael was pale, but after a moment he nodded. “Okay. Okay, fine. As long as we find them. Whatever you want.”

He would have agreed to anything for Alex’s continued help. Alex knew that and felt sick. He closed the folders on the table and walked away slowly, back to the computer. “Start moving these boxes.”

“Okay.”

He sat down and closed his eyes for a moment, typing nonsense into a command box just so it would look like he was doing something. Now he’d shut down his anger, he couldn’t feel anything. It was all cause and effect, all lines of action and logic. He lifted a hand off the keyboard and pressed the shard of glass into his chest, and when he opened his eyes he could see the reflection of the room behind him. 

Boxes were floating into the air as Michael stood off to one side, frowning as he moved them with his mind. Alex didn’t want to disturb him. He wanted to scream at him. He wanted Michael to apologise for what he and his family had done. He wanted to know more. He didn’t want to know anything. He wanted to know everything.

Breathe. In for four, hold for four, out for four. Repeat. Repeat.

Alex opened his eyes and started dragging files onto his hard drive.

They made several trips back to Michael’s trailer, covering the boxes with a tarp in an attempt to hide what they were transporting. Alex’s stomach was churning, from nerves or the way he couldn’t get the image of Rosa’s dead, handprinted face out of his head, he didn’t know. It translated as hypervigilance, in any case. Even with the alien glass against his skin, he was freaking out every time they made the trip from the bunker to the junkyard, and he made Michael vary his routes every time.

The bunker looked glaringly empty after they’d moved the last few boxes, Michael having to use his arms rather than his mind. Alex hadn’t commented on how pale and sick he looked, and he was trying to ignore it. He didn’t feel much better himself. 

His dad was going to know something was wrong the second he arrived here, whenever that would be. The hatch lock was broken, and all his material was gone. The conference table was bare, and Alex had taken the computer tower rather than wiping it in case there was anything he’d missed. His dad would know immediately that he’d been robbed, and his first suspect would likely be Michael. They’d hidden everything into Michael’s bunker, rendering it basically unusable by filling up over half the available space, but it wasn’t that well concealed. 

They didn’t have time to go through all the information they’d stolen, and if they waited any longer than it took to locate Penvale, they risked Alex’s dad coming directly to Michael and trying to either capture him too or just kill him outright. There just wasn’t enough time.

Alex gripped the side of the seat in Michael’s truck as they drove away, trying to see everything at once. He had to keep pressing the alien glass into his chest, and still, he felt overexposed and raw. Panicky in a way he recognised from childhood. 

“You gonna unclench any time soon?” Michael drawled. When Alex didn’t answer, he kept pushing, apparently unable to let it go. “Relax, man. Anyone’d think you’ve never committed a crime before.”

“We haven’t committed a crime.”

“We’ve trespassed on Air Force property,” Michael shrugged. “Stealing’s still a crime, even if the stuff we took wasn’t public knowledge.”

“I’m not worried about the cops, Guerin.”

“Then what? Your dad?”

_Your dad._

Alex’s stomach twisted, and he held his breath through what almost became a dry heave. Michael noticed, of course. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Alex barely recognised his own voice. “I’m unclenching.”

“Yeah, you look you’re doing the opposite of that.”

“Then don’t look at me,” Alex snapped, and hated himself for it immediately. He sounded like a petulant fucking child.

“Are you haunted?” Michael’s concern dragged at Alex’s frayed nerves like broken glass. “Hey, lemme –”

Alex flinched from his outstretched hand, and Michael froze, eyes flicking between Alex and the road, his other hand keeping the steering wheel steady. “Alex?”

“Don’t touch me, okay?” Alex felt the edges of an oncoming panic attack and fixed his eyes on the dashboard. “Just don’t.”

“Okay.”

Michael didn’t say any more, and Alex concentrated on his breathing, and on what he could see, on what was real.

Usually, it worked. Usually, he wasn’t in Roswell. Usually, he wasn’t within spitting distance of his childhood home, and he didn’t remember what his dad smelled like, and he wasn’t sitting in a truck with the man whose life he’d ruined, with the man his family had hunted like an animal, the man who had helped cover up the murder of one of his best friends.

Which one took precedence? There was no procedure Alex could follow, no manual that could tell him whether one cancelled out the other. Was it worse that Michael had covered up Rosa’s murder and had clearly had no intentions of ever letting the truth out, or was it worse that Alex’s involvement in his life had led to his wrecked hand, and that his family had kidnapped Michael’s? It was a mess. Everything was such a mess, and Alex hated that he still wanted to ask Michael whether it hurt that his sister believed he was a murderer, and his brother had gone along with that lie. He still wanted to lean against Michael’s side, wanted to touch his hair, wanted to kiss him.

Michael had covered up Rosa’s murder, and Alex still wanted him. And there was still a terror sitting in the pit of his stomach that his dad would catch them, and hurt Michael. Kill him, even.

_Your dad._

When Michael pulled into the junkyard and cut the engine, Alex waited for him to get out. When he didn’t, he closed his eyes and made himself speak. “Guerin.”

“Yeah?”

“I need to take a walk. I’ll find you when I’m done.” He didn’t look at Michael as he opened the door and slid out. He had to hold onto the edge of it for a second when his legs wobbled.

If Michael replied, Alex didn’t hear it. He still had the gun, and his grip on it and the warmth of the shard against his breastbone were the only things that grounded him as he walked to the edge of the fence and then beyond. He needed to do a perimeter check. He needed to be out of Michael’s sight. He needed to find a convenient spot to throw up.

He couldn’t throw up, in the end. He heaved a few times and spat on the ground, but the nausea had passed enough that his stomach was no longer churning as badly as it had been.

Work backwards. His mentor had told him that, several times. He’d said that plenty of shades came into the job with pre-fucked brains, and being a shade was only going to make it worse. He’d talked almost cheerfully about how his PTSD from his own military service (Army, seven years, two tours) and his time as an active shade (four years) had crossed wires in his brain, so he would feel a temperature drop and start getting flashbacks to Afghanistan. 

They key, he said, was to work backwards and treat it like a logic puzzle. Figure out which wires were getting tripped and figure out where they led. 

So: Alex was having a panic attack. That was the effect. The prospect of Michael asking about it or talking about it or making jokes about it or being gentle with him or generally interacting with him in any way right now was making it worse. Michael usually made him feel better. Right now, Michael would make him feel worse. 

It was like trying to think while astronomically drunk. Alex leaned against the outside of the fence around the junkyard and counted his breaths for a couple of minutes, getting his phone out to time it so he wouldn’t lose track. Losing time was too easy for him when he was like this.

Michael’s presence was a reminder of what Alex’s family, and specifically his father, had done to him. The part of Alex that wanted to help him was at war with the part of him that thought Michael deserved it for what he’d done to Rosa. So the root cause, at the end of the day, was guilt. Guilt at what his family had done to Michael’s, guilt at hating Michael for his part in what his family had done to Rosa, and guilt at still caring about him despite that.

Alex set his phone timer for five minutes and kept counting his breaths, keeping them slow and steady.

He would fix this. He would find Michael’s family and free them. He would erase the truth of what they were from any other files his dad had. He would blackmail his dad with the evidence he and Michael had taken from the Project Shepherd bunker. He would force him to leave Roswell or face the consequences for his actions. He would trace every single other person involved in Project Shepherd, and he would blackmail them too. If the threat of releasing the Project Shepherd information didn’t work, he would make it personal. He would threaten to expose other secrets, he would do whatever it took. 

He wasn’t an arbiter of justice, but he could do that. He could do his best to absolve himself of his family’s actions. And then he would make Michael, Max, and Isobel face up to what they’d done. In the meantime, he would stay away from Michael. 

Alex’s phone vibrated to signal the end of the timer, and he stopped it with a tap of his thumb, a long sigh escaping from his pursed lips. 

He felt better for figuring everything out. Still kind of shaky, but that was more from a lack of food than anything else at this point. He was past the danger zone – he knew he could see Michael now and not have a complete breakdown.

When Alex got back to the trailer, it was pushed back to expose the round hatch of Michael’s bunker. Alex could hear Michael moving things around down there, and went into the trailer to wash his face. He didn’t want to call out, for some reason, and he didn’t want to climb down if Michael was planning on coming up.

He looked over at the lawn chairs as he emerged from the Airstream and decided against it almost immediately. The prospect of sitting out under the open sky was a chilling one right now. It was bad enough standing under it. He realised that he kept looking up, as though expecting something to fall on him. A meteor, or a spaceship.

The bunker suddenly seemed a very welcoming place indeed, and Alex sighed and got down on his knees to lower himself backwards into the shaft, where the smell of chilli rose to greet him.

Michael had taken a couple of boxes out of the four-box-deep wall that now completely blocked the back wall of the bunker. He was sorting through the contents of the one he had open on the light table when Alex turned around at the base of the ladder, and he looked up with a mixed sense of relief and foreboding as the hatch swung itself closed, and heard the trailer scrape its way into place above them. “You can do that without even looking?” he asked.

“Done it so many times, it’s easy now.” Michael glanced at him over his shoulder. “There’s food if you want it.” He nodded to the table, where two plastic takeout boxes sat among the files, a spoon in each. One was empty, the other almost full, and Alex reached for it with a sort of resignation. This was Michael’s life, he figured. Much like his own diet was dictated by what he could cook on a one ring burner in a motel room or what takeout he decided he could afford, Michael’s diet was making enough to feed himself for days and then eating exactly that, for days. At least Michael had a refrigerator to store his leftovers.

“Thanks.”

“Perimeter all good?” Michael asked, and Alex leaned against the central table and eased his weight off his prosthesis. “You were up there a while.”

“Yeah.” Alex dragged the spoon through the chilli and watched the way the oil beaded orange and slick along the metal.

Michael sighed. “Look, you’re pissed, I get it. You can take a swing at me if it’ll help.”

The idea of hitting Michael made Alex’s stomach lurch. “It won’t. And we’re not talking about Rosa, okay? Not until this is over and I can talk to Isobel about it.”

“What is this about then?” Michael asked, just a hint of combat in his tone. “If it’s not Rosa, is it your dad? I can defend myself if he snaps on me again.”

“He knows what you are.” Alex didn’t look at him. “He won’t come for your hand if he catches you mixed up in this, Guerin. He’ll kill you.”

“I can defend myself,” Michael repeated. “Alex.” He waited, and Alex reluctantly dragged his gaze up to meet Michael’s eyes. “I can defend you too, okay?”

Alex’s lips twitched, more of a sneer than a smile. “My hero.”

Michael put the files he was holding down and turned to face him properly, leaning against the table where his ship’s console was shimmering in the orange light. “He’s only a human,” he said, calm and sure. “And he didn’t catch us. You can –”

“Don’t tell me to relax.”

“Well I was gonna say chill, but I guess it comes down to semantics, right?” A smile flickered across Michael’s face, bracketed by a frown that grew deeper when Alex didn’t say anything. “Alex?”

“It’s an association thing.” Alex stirred the chilli, not looking at Michael. “That’s all. Don’t worry about it.”

“Association with what?” 

“Nothing.”

“The guy smashed my hand in, man, I know he’s got a temper.”

Alex blinked. He stopped picking at the chilli and looked at Michael again, frowning. “You think that was his temper?”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “He pinned you by your throat and hit me with a hammer. You’re telling me that was a calm, rational reaction?”

“He went for my throat because he didn’t want me talking back,” Alex explained. “He went for your hand because that’s what you touched me with. He has reasons. Always.”

Michael’s lips parted, and closed again. He was absolutely still, not even blinking, and Alex stared at him, realising only then what Michael was thinking. “That wasn’t the first time,” Michael said slowly, and Alex had to laugh. There was literally no other reaction he could have.

“You thought it was?”

“I thought he…because he caught you with me, with a guy,” Michael said, eyes wide, and Alex snorted.

“Guerin, he knew I was gay before _I_ did. He wasn’t pissed at finding out – he was pissed because I dared to act on it, under his roof. I broke the rules, it’s that simple.”

Michael looked kind of blank. “What were the rules?”

Alex shrugged. “Whatever he said they were.” He couldn’t read Michael’s face; he couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. Did he think Alex was an idiot for not getting out sooner? Was he finally realising how selfish and stupid Alex had been to bring him back to the tool shed that day? He breathed out and put the chilli back on the table, unable to stomach the thought of eating it. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I know you said you don’t wanna hear it, but I didn’t know you thought it was your fault. It wasn’t, okay? It was mine. I never should’ve brought you back there, I shouldn’t’ve put you in his path.”

“I put myself there.” Michael scowled, finally, a real expression that Alex could read. “I didn’t know. I should’ve…why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why’d you live in your truck rather than at some foster home?” Alex shot back, cruel. “I didn’t hear you kicking up a fuss back then.”

“If I had, I might’ve been moved out of Roswell,” Michael snapped. “And – that wasn’t what I meant, I didn’t mean tell a teacher or something like that, I didn’t…fuck.” He turned around and pushed a hand through his hair, gripping the back of his own neck. “Forget it.”

“I do my best,” Alex said, acidic. “You said you had maps from the forties. Let’s see them.”

“Right.” Michael shot him a quick, unreadable look, then went to a cabinet at the side of the bunker and pulled a drawer open. “This is the most detailed,” he said, pulling out a thick wedge of paper and starting to unfold it. It was huge, bigger than the central table, and Alex stepped forward to help Michael spread it loosely over the tops of the boxes and piles of paper.

“The crash site is here.” Michael pointed to a spot already marked with a small red cross. “Penvale must be around here somewhere.”

“Square by square,” Alex muttered, squinting at the faint lines. “You take east, I’ll take west, we’ll meet in the middle.”

“Got it.”

Michael found it first, surprisingly quick. But then, he was more familiar with the map, Alex figured. He leaned in to see where Michael was pointing, to a spot about a hundred miles southeast of Roswell, close to the Texas border. There it was on the map, in tiny italic print. _Penvale_. 

“No indication of what it actually is,” Alex frowned. 

“Does it matter?” Michael looked at him. “It’ll be a building or a bunker. Either way, that’s where they are.”

“Maybe.” Alex rubbed his fingertip gently over the spot on the map and traced the path back to Roswell with his eyes. “I don’t like this.”

“Yeah, well it’s not exactly a picnic for me either,” Michael said unkindly, and Alex rolled his eyes.

“No, I mean it’s too rushed. Rescue operations always are.” He sighed and straightened, stepping away from Michael. “We don’t have time to do any decent recon. We’ve been sloppy, breaking into that bunker and stealing the files. We don’t have any time for a better plan than just hoping the element of surprise and your powers will carry us through.”

“You wanna go now then?” Michael sounded oddly relieved, like he’d expected to have to persuade Alex into it.

“It’s one of the better options.”

“What’re the others?” Michael cocked his head. “Out of interest.”

Alex leaned against the table again, tensing and relaxing the muscles in his residual limb to try and ease the ache. “Can’t be sure until I’ve looked through all the data we lifted. I’ll do a deeper search for Penvale or any other containment facilities, but I’m not optimistic.” That wasn’t what Michael had asked, he reminded himself, and worked his jaw. “But…based on what we know now, I’d say the best options are to either strike out now and hope to hit hard and fast, or go back to the Project Shepherd bunker and wait for my dad to show up.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “And then, what? Torture some information out of him?”

“The man’s been running an illegal operation for a decade, at huge risk to himself.” Alex shook his head. “And information gained by torture is unreliable. The better option, if possible, would be to trick him into thinking I’m on his side, possibly by using you as bait. If that worked, he would take us right to your family, and we could flip on him there. But that’s less likely to work than just attacking, I think.”

“Why?”

“Because my dad doesn’t trust me, and never has,” Alex said flatly. “And the risk of him killing or significantly incapacitating you is way too high in that scenario.” It had the potential for greater control of the situation, but the risks outweighed the gains. “This isn’t a job, to him. It’s a crusade. And there’s no good way to deal with a fanatic.”

“So you wanna side-step him.” Michael nodded. “What about after?”

“I have my dad’s data.” Alex had thought it through. “It depends on the size of the operation we find. My dad’s pockets will be running pretty dry after ten years with no official aid. We shouldn’t encounter more than a skeleton crew, and that’ll be easier to deal with. If it’s big, if there are obviously people higher up than my dad involved…” He took a deep breath. “We can cross that bridge if we have to, but it involves leaving Roswell, and the country.”

Michael didn’t quite flinch, but it looked like a close thing. “I can’t.”

“If you have to, you will. But like I said, we’ll cross these bridges if we come to them. Try not to freak out, there are far worse scenarios than that.”

Michael opened his mouth and then closed it again, shaking his head. “I don’t wanna know.”

Smart. Alex shrugged, as close to an apology as he could offer. “We should get going.”

“You should eat on the way.” Michael folded up the map. “I need to fill up the tank, we can get whatever you want. I know you don’t want any more chilli.”

“It’s not the chilli’s fault I feel kinda sick right now. I swear it’s nothing to do with your cooking.”

Michael gave him a small, crooked smile. “Thanks.”

Alex cast a look around the bunker, wishing they had more time. Wishing Michael’s smile didn’t hurt to see. “I’ll take my laptop,” he decided. “See what I can get from those files on the way. Unless you want me to drive?”

“I’ll stock up on acetone, don’t worry. I’m good.” Michael stuffed the thickly folded map into his back pocket and headed for the ladder. Behind him, the takeout boxes rose into the air and followed as though pulled on invisible strings.

Michael climbed to the top of the ladder to peek out of the hatch before moving the Airstream so they could get out. They were in his truck in under five minutes, and Alex realised that the jittery feeling crawling under his skin was familiar, the feeling he’d always gotten before going into danger when he’d been an airman. It made him wish for a better gun, but they didn’t have time. The urgency was pressing at him now, and Michael too, if the grim look on his face was any indication.

Alex opened his laptop and pressed the alien glass into his chest with his free hand as it booted up. This was familiar too; being driven somewhere while trying to find crucial intel in terabytes of stolen data. But at least every time before this, he’d had more than just one other person with him, and those people had been highly trained. Michael, for all his alien powers, was a civilian.

There were so many things that were wrong with their situation that Alex would lose it if he started counting them, so he concentrated on sorting through the Project Shepherd data instead.

Michael got gas, and walked across the road to get him something called a breakfast wrap too. “Bland as fuck,” he said, shoving it into Alex’s hand. “Nothing in there that could make you feel any sicker.”

Alex took it, making the conscious decision not to smile. “Thanks.”

Michael nodded and swung the truck around to head south. The ride was silent. Alex ate the wrap, which really did taste of nothing, and tuned out everything that wasn’t on his laptop screen. Once they were past the city limits, he slid the homemade pendant off and put it on the seat between him and Michael. He wanted to keep his senses for what they were about to do. Every now and then, he’d speak or ask a question, but nothing more.

**From: Maria [13:09]**  
What’s going on???  
Lmk where you’re going at least! Like I said last night, idc if it’s dangerous.  
Seriously Alex, you’re freaking me out rn.

**To: Maria [13:37]**  
Headed to an old site called Penvale, east of Carlsbad.  
Didn’t say earlier, but Guerin and I warded Kyle Valenti’s cabin yesterday. Keep an eye on him if you can, or just get in contact and tell him I told you to.

**From: Maria [13:42]**  
Why? Do I need to hurt him for you?

**To: Maria [13:43]**  
No, just keep an eye on him. I have to go, I’ll check in with you tonight okay?

**From: Maria [13:44]**  
If I don’t hear anything from you by midnight I’m closing up and coming after you.

**To: Maria [13:44]**  
Duly noted X

Alex breathed out and put his phone down, turning his attention back to his laptop. “Do you recognise these symbols?” he asked Michael after a while.

“No.”

Later – “Looks like Penvale is small, if this means what I think it does.” What he wouldn’t give for some blueprints. “Renamed in 1964 to Facility T-589.”

“’64 – that’s when your grandpa took over.”

“Material was moved around then.”

Later – “Does ‘auxiliary internal power structure’ mean anything to you, with reference to your own anatomy?”

“Sounds like you’re asking if I’ve got a pacemaker. Which, y’know, not that I know of, but I’ve never had an x-ray or anything, so I don’t know.”

An hour in – “Have you ever been able to direct the electromagnetic energy haunts produce?”

“Never tried.”

Later – “I think this is a research facility. A small one. They mention material transfer between here and a place called Facility R-378 a bunch of times. I think R-378 is the warehouse, and this is the lab.” 

“The _lab?_” 

“Possibly. We don’t know anything for sure.”

Later, with some relief – “I have satellite imagery.”

“Can you tell how big it is?”

“Not big. The size of the science block at school, maybe. But there could be a lot underground we can’t see.” Alex’s fingers tapped across the keyboard. “This is good though. I can see two obvious doors already.”

“What else are you gonna look for?”

“Heat signatures and vehicles. This place is in the middle of nowhere – if people are working here, even if they’re on-site 24/7, they have to be doing supply runs. Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull over. I’m getting a decent connection here, and we’re close already. We shouldn’t go further without the information I can get from this.”

Michael slowed the truck down and eased it off the road. “Anything I can do?”

“Don’t distract me.”

“Right,” Michael muttered.

Alex tuned him out again. He’d given up on keeping this case legal, and it was exhilarating to be in the field again, in a sense. He’d wondered in the way he imagined a lot of people in Intelligence wondered, what he would do if he was ever confronted with a situation where whistleblowing or something similar appealed over following orders. Orders conflicted with morals all the time, that wasn’t anything new, but Alex had wondered, never voicing it, what he would do if he was faced with something truly horrific that he could actually do something about.

He wasn’t a good person. He had absolutely no illusions about that. He’d killed people himself, and his actions behind various computer screens had led to the deaths of many, many more. Technically, he’d already been faced with that choice, plenty of times. But this was different. At least every operation he’d undertaken as an airman had been vetted – there was a chain of command, and a process for everything. There was follow-up and accountability after the fact. What his dad was doing was completely off the books, and there didn’t seem to be anyone or anything in place to check him.

The pixelated images he slowly downloaded gave him a picture of Penvale’s activity over the last two weeks. Incomplete and patchy, but it was better than nothing. Two service vehicles and one civilian car came and went at odd intervals. He didn’t want to assume too much, but the car was dark, definitely a passing match for his dad’s. Going back over the last few months, those were the only vehicles coming and going, and going back further, the activity was even less frequent. It had kicked up over the last two months, and over the last two weeks it had kicked up further still, with at least one vehicle parked outside at all times.

There was no indication of how many other people were there though. There were no images of any people outside the building, but if Max, Isobel, and Noah really were being held there, there would have to be at least a guard per alien. At _least._ And whatever they’d done to spark the haunting explosion in Roswell meant there had to be at least one person with scientific expertise. 

If there had been time, Alex would have dug into his dad’s financial records. There were only so many people he could be paying to do a full-time, dangerous job like guarding aliens with powers like Max and Isobel’s. 

There was no time for any of that though.

“We’ll approach like clueless, lost hikers,” he told Michael. “Phone batteries dead, looking for directions. Start driving again.”

“You find anything useful?” Michael asked, gunning the truck back onto the road with a sharp jerk of the wheel.

“Not much. Confirmation of entrances, confirmation of activity increasing over the last few weeks. There’s a civilian car I’m pretty sure is my dad’s that’s been coming here almost every day, it looks like.”

“You find anything from last Thursday?”

“No. Couldn’t get heat readings either, there isn’t time.” Alex sighed, frustrated. “It’ll be a miracle if we pull this off. We don’t even have space for everyone in this pickup.”

“Plenty of room in the back,” Michael said stubbornly. “And there’s still time if you wanna get out.”

“Okay, first of all, no there isn’t.” Alex rolled his eyes. “We’re about twenty minutes away, maybe less, and the closest place imitating civilisation out here will be a very long walk from here. A walk I would probably struggle to complete, what with having only one functioning leg, and only one bottle of water. Secondly, I already told you, I’m doing this.”

“Even though you know about Rosa now?”

“I want Isobel to face up to what she’s done,” Alex snapped, and made a conscious effort to calm down. “Also,” he added, “none of that changes the fact that she and your brother and Noah have been illegally detained.”

“And what, two wrongs don’t make a right?” Michael was frowning, when Alex looked over. Like he didn’t understand Alex’s point of view at all.

“They’re separate issues,” Alex said, looking forward again. “The three of you covered up a murder. My family has been hunting yours for literally generations. Right now, one has to take priority, but believe me when I tell you that I’m about as close to forgetting about Rosa as chopping off my other leg.”

“Okay. Just…don’t bite my head off or anything, I just wanna…you’re not gonna leave her there, right? And you’re not gonna attack her or anything?”

“Priority one is getting them out alive and safe,” Alex said. “Everything else waits. Anything that could possibly get in the way of that is waiting. So no, Guerin, I’m not going to get to Penvale, release Max and Noah, and leave Isobel behind.” Particularly when Max or Noah was the other murderer.

“Okay. Good.”

Alex closed his laptop. “Take the next right. It’ll be at the end of that road.”

Michael nodded.

The scrubland stretched out around them on all sides, rising slightly to their right. Beyond that, Alex knew, were oil fields. The wind was up, and the sky was cloudy in a half-hearted sort of way, wisps and lines of white-grey smudged like paint across the horizon. Nothing special. Nothing frightening, until the gigantic black dog flickered into life as it ran across the road in front of them.

“Shit!” Alex reached instinctively for the wheel and barely stopped himself in time. “Shit, sorry.”

“What the hell? What – did you see something?”

“Did you not?”

“Distortion.” Michael shrugged, blinking at him for a second before looking back at the road. “Background stuff, it’s all over the place out here. You know this is really close to the site of the first nuclear bomb test in New Mexico?”

Alex stared at him. “Nuclear radiation has no effect on haunting activity.”

“Bullshit.” Michael shook his head. “Maybe it’s undetectable by humans, but that stuff leaves residue. What did you see in the road? I just saw a little haze patch.”

“Black dog.” Alex looked back at the road, scanning their surroundings more carefully. “Pretty common. It just surprised me.”

“I’ll say. You seeing anything else?”

“No. Are you?”

Michael kissed his teeth and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know. Yes and no.”

“Well that’s helpful.”

Michael sighed. “It’s like…okay, for you, ghosts can appear and disappear, right?”

“Yeah.”

“They don’t, the way I see them. The level of distortion jumps occasionally, like it’s having a sort of energy surge, but it’s a constant feed. What I’m seeing right now, it’s flickering. It’s weird, I’ve never seen it do that before.”

“You didn’t think to mention this?” Alex asked, incredulous.

“It’s only been happening for the last few miles,” Michael huffed. “I thought it might be a radiation thing, I was gonna wait till we got there to be sure.”

“You sure now?”

“No.” Michael frowned at the road and slowed down to take the right turning as it appeared. Another dirt road, even narrower than the one they’d been on. “I’m getting surer though.”

“What does it look like for you now?”

“Fucky.” Michael kept their speed down and rubbed at his face quickly with his good hand. “Weird. Like, there and then gone. Like I’m seeing two versions of the same picture.”

“Keep me updated on this,” Alex ordered. “And be prepared for your powers to be weakened or ineffective,” he added. “They must have some way of neutralising them, or they’re keeping Max and Isobel sedated.”

“How’re we getting them out if they’re sedated and I can’t use my powers?” 

“Slower.” Possibly by forcing one of the guards to assist them. Another bridge they would cross when they got to it. “Keep flexing your powers as we approach. Just check they’re still working.”

“You got it.”

The roof of a small, one-storey building appeared in the distance as a dark bump, rising out of the scrub with pale walls and an abandoned appearance as they approached. Alex was expecting it to have an aura of some kind, but when the effect hit it was like nothing he’d ever experienced. It was like Michael had described – there and gone again. A flash of intense horror and despair, and then nothing out of the ordinary. Alex jumped when it happened, and held up a hand to cut off Michael’s questions.

When it happened again, he felt it through his entire body, like his muscles were seizing up with pure terror and his mind was whiting out. He bit down on his tongue to stop himself swearing and breathed through it. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff and feeling his balance tip to the wrong side. Pure animalistic fear distilled down to its sharpest essence, launched at him like an attack.

He focused on what was real. He was sitting down, his balance was centred, his hands were clenched. 

The fear vanished, and he breathed out. “Jesus.”

“Are you okay?” Michael asked immediately, alarmed. He’d stopped the truck. Alex hadn’t noticed that.

“Yeah. Give it a second; I think it’ll happen again. Did you see anything?”

Michael nodded. “The whole building fucked up for a second. Like, outta nowhere, the whole thing was haunted as hell.”

“That tracks.”

“What did you see?”

“Didn’t see anything.” Alex breathed in and out as steadily as he could. “Just felt it, like an adrenaline rush.”

“Felt what?”

“Fear.” Alex shrugged. “It’s fine, I’m used to it.”

“Because you’re a shade?”

“Yeah. And – _ngh._” The fear hit again like a tonne of bricks, and this time Alex’s other senses got in on the action. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second when the building turned to darkness, and forced himself to open them again to get a better look. “Walls’re gone,” he gritted out. “I can smell blood, and something else, something I don’t recognise. Building’s gone dark, like a void. Never seen that before.” He hoped his tone wasn’t giving on how freaked out he was. “Metal on metal, like cutlery but more delicate. Antiseptic. Balance is fucked. Feels like I’m falling.”

“Alex –”

Alex could tell Michael was reaching out to him and snapped, “Don’t. Let it.” He swallowed. “It’s useful. Boots on the ground, I can hear that. Something else, something like a huge machine humming. Needles.” Fuck, he could feel them, and he held himself as still as physically possible, unable to convince himself that there weren’t needles in his shoulders and wrists, that tensing his muscles wouldn’t get them lodged under his skin. “Still falling.” The haunt vanished again, and Alex managed to relax slowly. He didn’t want Michael to think he was weak. “That’s really weird.”

“Don’t let it do that again,” Michael said angrily. He grabbed Alex’s hand and pressed the shard of alien glass into it. “Put this back on, okay?”

“I need my senses,” Alex argued. “It might come in handy.”

“Not if you can _smell blood,_ Alex.”

“Like I haven’t before? Don’t be so naïve.” Alex jerked his free hand at the road. “Come on, Guerin. We’ve got a job to do.”

Michael scowled, but put the truck back in drive. He drove round the back when Alex told him to, and despite what he’d said, Alex kept holding onto the alien glass.

It looked convincingly empty. Dirty, whitewashed walls with a low, flat roof, and small and windows so filthy nothing could be seen through them from a distance. Double doors at the front, a fire exit at the side. Around the back was a military jeep, and another door. No doors on the east side. A security camera at the front, but nowhere else.

“No wires,” Michael muttered. “They must have a generator.”

“Can you see anything?”

“Nothing.” Michael stopped the truck at the back of the building, pointing it towards the road for a quick escape without needing to be told. “Give me a second,” he said, and got out of the truck. Alex cursed under his breath and held onto the ship shard as he followed suit, pausing when he looked over and saw Michael staring at the building, then at the ground, a frown of concentration on his face.

Alex pressed his arm against the heavy bulk of the revolver in his waistband and scanned their surroundings, coming back to the building over and over. The dirt track showed nothing to him. The back door was black metal, battered and old-looking. The window frames were metal too, and looked like they hadn’t been opened for a long time. He wished he could have gotten heat signature imagery. The whole site was probably an iceberg, with an abandoned shell sitting on top of a much larger underground facility.

“They’re here.”

Alex’s gaze snapped to Michael. “You can feel them?”

“Real faint. Like…barely there at all. It’s Isobel.” Michael’s eyes were closed. “I’m sure of it. I can’t feel Max.” He opened his eyes, and Alex watched his throat move as he swallowed. “Can’t feel Noah either, but that’s no surprise.”

“Do you think you’d be able to pinpoint a direction?” Alex asked. “Like, if we came to a door, would you be able to tell if she’s behind it?”

“Maybe.” Michael sucked his lower lip between his teeth for a second and looked down at the ground. “Max and Isobel have a stronger connection. I’m not as…they can feel each other all the time. I don’t have that.”

Alex nodded, slipped the pendant into his pocket so there was no skin contact. It didn’t take long, and this time he was better prepared when the fear hit. It was like vertigo, and he wondered distantly whether it would have affected his balance so badly before he’d lost his leg. As it was, he felt its loss very keenly indeed, and found himself wishing he had a crutch for a third point of balance.

The building went dark again, and the longer he stared at it the deeper it appeared to go. There were no distinguishable corners inside it, nothing but an abyss, like someone had cut a building-shaped hole in the fabric of reality and Alex was staring behind the curtain of the universe.

“Alex?”

“Just a second.” He felt like he was falling upwards, falling into the darkness. He’d never been afraid of heights or huge open spaces, but this wasn’t like jumping out of a plane or looking out at the endless ocean. This was bigger than any of that. Bigger than the whole world, and he was nothing in the face of it. Less than dust, less than atoms. The darkness glittered, and Alex staggered as reality snapped back into place. “_Ah._”

“Alex.” Michael was right next to him, visibly shaken. “No more, seriously. It was infecting you.”

“That’s not how haunts work.” Alex took a deep breath and met his eyes. “I think it’s space.”

“What?”

“You know I said the building kind of turned into a void?”

“Yeah?”

“I think it was space.” Alex slipped his hand into his pocket and wrapped his hand around the alien glass again. He thought about his mother, and generational pain. Thought about the impressions of metal instruments he’d gotten, the smell of blood and antiseptic. Michael’s people and their long journey through the darkness. He took the pendant out and slid the string over his head, ignoring the way Michael let out a sigh of relief when he did. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

“You’ll do the talking?” Michael muttered, falling in beside him as they approached the door.

“Yeah. Follow my lead, and if I tell you to do something, don’t stop to argue, just do it.”

“I trust you.”

Alex’s heart felt like it skipped a beat, but he just nodded. He couldn’t return the sentiment, even if he wanted to.

The doors opened onto a clean corridor, immediately dispelling the illusion of the building being abandoned. Alex waved Michael behind him and started forward. There was a door on each side just before the corridor split in a crossroads, and Alex checked both of them quickly. Both empty, both clean. 

He led Michael on, not taking either turning though he could see a staircase at the end of one, and checked the next two rooms too. Those were both empty, but both had workbenches and stools in them, looking for all the world like their high school science classrooms. Michael looked tense and ready to lash out, and Alex didn’t let himself steady him with a touch to his arm or shoulder. 

Another two doors, two more empty classrooms. The corridor ended in the double doors they’d seen at the front of the building, and Alex led the way back to where the corridor split, taking them left first. There were bathrooms, a stocked janitor’s closet, and another empty room.

Finally, they made their way to the staircase. On the way was only one door which opened into a windowless room with a large screen at one end and chairs stacked at the sides. “Movie night at the alien prison?” Michael muttered.

Alex didn’t respond. With the autopsy photos he’d found, he could easily imagine the sort of films shown in here. He ushered Michael out and closed the door behind him, and finally headed for the staircase. It went directly forward, underneath the outer wall of the building, and then turned a sharp corner to go back the other way. The steps were old concrete, with white stripes painted on the edges that had been worn down by years of use until the centre was plain concrete again.

Alex went down slowly, not using the railing. He couldn’t hear anything except Michael walking down behind him, and the urge to draw the gun itched at him. It wouldn’t be any good for selling their lost tourist story though, and even if they recognised Michael, Alex’s face should be an unknown to anyone but his dad, who definitely wasn’t here.

The stairs went down two floors. The first flight led to another, wider corridor, painted an ugly military beige. “Feel anything?” Alex whispered.

“No. Nothing more than before.” Michael lifted his hand and floated his truck keys in the air for a second. “Still got the juice though.”

“What about haunts?”

“Same as before, coming in and out. They’re thicker down here when they’re present though.”

“Okay.” Alex tipped his head in the direction of the next flight down. “Thicker down there too?”

“Yeah.”

Alex could see his own suspicion reflected in Michael’s eyes – the thicker the haunts, the more likely that was where Max, Isobel, and Noah were being held. He led the way down the next flight. The lights down here were off, but there was a switch on the wall, something that looked like it had been installed in the fifties.

The corridor they found themselves in was narrower, but painted the same beige as upstairs. Alex could hear the hum of machinery – probably the generator Michael had theorised was on site – and crept forward quietly. The corridor split at the end in two directions like a T, the branch on the left shorter than the one on the right. A panel on the door at the end of the left branch helpfully read _Generator_, so Alex went to check that one first.

As expected, the room was empty apart from the growling hum of the machine. Michael walked around it slowly, and frowned when he came back to Alex. “They’ve got oil being piped in direct. Wonder if the owner of the oil fields knows about it?”

“Probably not.” Alex gestured for Michael to follow him out, and they headed down the right branch. The door at the end was black metal like the doors outside, and Alex jumped when he touched the handle and got a static shock so strong he actually saw the spark. “Shit.”

“Distortion’s crazy down here,” Michael whispered. “They’ve gotta be in there.”

Alex touched the handle again tentatively, then wrapped his hand around it and pulled when he received no further shocks.

The room was huge, and deep. An ancient metal staircase led down to the floor, a full ten feet below the door level. The air inside was hot, almost feverish, and glowing in the centre of the dark chamber were three egg-shaped pods, narrow and shining.

Michael started down the stairs, and Alex grabbed his sleeve to stop him. “Wait!”

“They’re doing something to them!” Michael argued, pointing. Alex squinted and saw that he was right – there were thick black wires stuck to the surfaces of all three, and he couldn’t see where they snaked off too in the dark.

“Wait,” he hissed, and let go of Michael to find a light switch. He was almost afraid to throw it when his fingers touched it – he could feel the electricity fizzing under his skin, charging the air around him. He turned the lights on anyway, and stared as the chamber was illuminated by caged bulbs set into the walls.

The pods were on a metal grille platform in the centre of the room. The wires led to a machine he couldn’t immediately identify, a big metal contraption that was hooked up to a computer that looked like it hadn’t been updated since the year 2000. There was a long workbench along the back wall with an array of instruments Alex didn’t recognise, and at the very end was what looked like a box covered by a white cloth. When he looked at it, he could have sworn he felt static crackle over his skin.

Michael was on the move again, and Alex followed him down at a slower pace. “Guerin, they aren’t in here.”

“How the hell’re we gonna get these out?” Michael whispered, and Alex hurried to grab his arm before he could reach out to touch the closest pod.

“Guerin! We have to shut whatever the hell they’re doing down first before you stick your hands into things that we don’t understand!”

Michael wrenched his hand away, but didn’t argue. “They must be upstairs.”

“Yeah. Come on.” Alex went back up the stairs and switched the light off when he got to the top. In the darkness, the pods glowed with otherworldly beauty. Alex couldn’t help thinking how much more beautiful they’d be without all those wires attached to them.

The next floor up seemed almost cold compared to the dry heat of the chamber the pods were being kept in. The corridor ended in another T junction, but the corridors were longer in both directions, with dimly lit bulbs in cages set into the ceilings. There were more doors to the left than to the right, and the corridor to the right ended in a metal door. “Left or right?” he murmured as Michael came up behind him. “Any feeling?”

Michael moved past him to stand exactly in the middle of the fork and closed his eyes, brow furrowed. Alex kept his eyes flicking back and forth, ears pricked, and waited. Michael turned slowly to the right, and then to the left, and finally shook his head, giving Alex a worried look.

Alex stepped forward a little and lifted his finger to his lips. With his other hand he touched the lump under his shirt where the alien glass lay against his chest, and using the fabric as a barrier, lifted it up. The moment it came out of contact with his skin, the corridor vanished.

He stayed upright only because he’d been expecting it, and still had to hold his other hand out like he was balancing on a wire, trying not to wobble. He could feel the ground under his feet, he could feel the effect of gravity on his body, but all he could see was empty black nothingness all around him. His own body was perfectly visible, and he had no feeling of actual darkness, and the fear was manageable. A steadily thrumming panic at the back of his mind, like moth wings against glass. 

The darkness held stars. The darkness held infinity. Alex breathed out slowly and turned his head to the left, where he knew the corridor was in reality, and then to the right.

And there – a glimmer of light. Faint, barely there, but unmistakable now he’d seen the pieces of Michael’s ship, and the strange buildings in his own dreams. Parts of another world, travelling through the vast abyss of space.

He let go of the alien glass and staggered, letting Michael catch and steady him for a second before he found his feet and pulled away. “Right,” he whispered, and led the way.

There were only two doors down the right-hand corridor, one on each side. Alex was certain that the prisoners would be behind the metal door, but clearing each room on the way was important. He sort of wished he hadn’t when he cracked open the first door though, and closed it immediately before Michael could see anything over his shoulder.

“What?” Michael whispered. Alex shook his head, but Michael’s eyes went wide and panicked. “Let me see!”

“It’s Noah,” Alex whispered back, and saw the emotions flash across Michael’s face as he correctly interpreted Alex’s tone. Relief, dismay, self-disgust, grief.

“Let me see,” he insisted.

Alex had only seen into the room for a second, but he felt absolutely confident in shaking his head. “It’s bad, Guerin. You don’t wanna see this.”

Michael, stubborn bastard that he was, just set his jaw and pushed Alex’s hand on the door handle out of the way. Alex held his gaze for a long moment before finally conceding the space and letting him push the door open again.

Noah’s naked body was laid out on a metal table in the centre of the room. It wasn’t an operating table, Alex realised now he was looking at it properly – it was a mortuary slab. Noah’s skull had been sawn open and closed again, his head partially shaved to expose the skin. There was a Y-shaped incision down his front that hadn’t been stitched up. The skin on one side was still peeled back, the pink-red cavern of his insides on display, white lines of fat and bone shining through.

Michael made a quiet, choked sound, and Alex closed the door behind him quickly, something in his chest feeling oddly tight. He’d failed. He’d promised Michael he would help him find his family, and he’d failed, they’d been too late for Noah. He couldn’t stop thinking of the clothes Michael had picked out for him, sitting unused back in the Airstream. “Guerin, don’t look at him.”

“He…” Michael pressed his hand over his mouth, and Alex could see how wet his eyes were. His hand shook when he dropped it. “His, he’s…”

Alex grabbed his shoulders and yanked him around. “He’s gone,” he whispered, brutally shutting down his own guilt. There wasn’t time for it now. “You don’t have to look.”

“His chest,” Michael gasped. “He’s not human. He’s one of us. He was one of us.”

Alex hadn’t seen anything immediately different about Noah’s chest, but to be fair he hadn’t looked for more than a second. He’d seen bodies before, and he hated it. His eyes darted around the rest of the room quickly, taking in the stainless-steel surfaces, the medical lights, the actual operating table on the other side of the room. It was a big theatre, with plenty of room for both tables and a dividing curtain between them, and it was much colder than anywhere else had been, like it was refrigerated, but Alex couldn’t see more than a couple of ventilation panels or hear any circulation systems. Strangest of all were the glass cabinets in the wall opposite the operating table. Each about a foot square, three rows of them above the metal countertop.

Looking at them made Alex’s eyes hurt, and his teeth buzz. The alien glass burned hot against his breastbone, and he hissed and grabbed at it.

“What is it?” Michael looked at him, then at the cabinets. “What’s wrong?”

“Can you see anything in there?” Alex asked, looking away with a wince.

“Nothing.” Michael glanced over his shoulder at Noah and swallowed, then went to the cabinets. “They’re empty.”

“They’re not.” Alex steeled himself and looked again. Sharp pain went through his right eye, and for a second he saw two thirds of the cabinets filled with something – something. Like static, like contained and condensed heat shimmers, like video game glitches. There should have been a sound to accompany it, he felt, squeezing his eyes shut with a grunt of pain. Like a buzz or a hiss or the angry rush of TV static with the volume turned up high. But whatever was inside the cabinets was silent.

Michael was staring at him, twisting his head between Alex and the cabinets. “What can you see?” he asked slowly.

“What you do, when you look at haunts. I think.” Alex turned his back on them and rubbed at his right eye, which had teared up. The pain had developed into a throbbing headache already, and he was absolutely sure that whatever was in the cabinets was the same as whatever had been under that white cloth in the pod chamber downstairs. “Only I don’t think I’m biologically capable of processing it safely.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“It means it hurts to look at them.” Alex wiped his eye with his sleeve and looked over at Noah’s body. “We should keep moving, come on.”

The room on the other side was like a combination kitchen and storage room, with lots of shelving units with boxes and bags packed in tight. Alex checked a couple of boxes, finding MREs and medical supplies mixed in with surgical scrubs and stationary. 

He closed the door quietly, checked behind them again, and went to the door at the end of the corridor. It was the only door so far that had an electronic lock with a keypad built into the handle, and Alex ran his fingers along the top of it with a quiet hum.

“Want me to break it?” Michael whispered.

“Yeah,” Alex decided. Speed was of the essence, after all. He stepped aside slightly and looked back along the hallway as Michael narrowed his eyes at the door. 

It took a second, but there was a click, and the door swung open a couple of inches towards them. Alex went through first. The floor was a metal grille in here, a short corridor with two black metal doors on each side. A cellblock. Alex imagined Michael in one of them and his stomach clenched. Directly opposite them in the corner of the wall and ceiling was a small security camera, and Alex grabbed Michael’s arm when he made to push past him.

“Camera,” he whispered, keeping Michael out of sight of it. He peered over Alex’s shoulder anyway.

“Easy.” Michael tipped his chin back, and the camera moved, starting to tilt backwards to point up at the ceiling.

“No.” Alex kept him still. “Point it at the floor, like it’s broken.”

Michael didn’t reply, but the camera jerked to point at the ground. Alex let go of him and pulled the door open so they could go in. Michael made for the nearest door on the right and slid open the little hatch on the door to look inside.

“Max,” he breathed, and Alex’s heart hurt. He closed the door behind him, not quite pulling it to, and went to look in the other cells. Michael whirled to check the closest one on the left first, and there were tears in his eyes as he whispered, “Isobel.”

Both of the other cells were empty. Alex stared through the hatch of the one next to Max’s, taking it in. It was small, no more than seven or eight feet wide and maybe five feet deep. Bare concrete with a narrow metal shelf on the back wall as a bunk, and a toilet bowl at the wall. There was a nearly finished roll of toilet paper on the floor, and Alex guessed this had been Noah’s cell, before he’d been killed. How would it be phrased, in the Project Shepherd files? Exterminated? Put down? Eliminated?

“I can’t open them,” Michael whispered, sounding frantic. “Alex! Alex, I can’t open the doors, my powers aren’t working on them!”

“Okay.” Alex turned away and went to Michael’s side. Inside her cell, Isobel was sitting on her bunk, slumped against the wall in a thin nightdress. She was staring at them with slightly unfocused eyes, blinking quickly like she wasn’t sure they were real. Alex focused on the lock, an old-fashioned monstrosity that he realised with a flush of relief would be easy to pick.

He knelt down and got his picks out of his pocket, too tense to feel any satisfaction when Michael gaped down at him. “You have lockpicks?”

“Haven’t needed them with you around.” 

“Do all shades have lockpicks?”

“Most.” Alex had learned to pick locks with paperclips as a kid, but the actual tools were more reliable. He slid the tension wrench and a rake pick into the hole and twisted until he could feel the levers, counting them carefully. Only three, which figured for such an old lock. He breathed out and lifted each one until he could twist the wrench, and the bolt slid back. “Done.”

“Holy shit.” Michael’s hand fluttered at his shoulder for a second, like he wanted to grip it but wasn’t sure if he was allowed. Alex pushed himself to his feet and opened the cell door for him. 

“I’ll open Max’s next.”

Michael nodded, darting inside. Alex saw a split second of him cupping Isobel’s face with his hands, kneeling in front of her with a terrified expression, before he turned away to look into Max’s cell.

Max was unconscious, sprawled on the floor of his cell on his back like he’d been dumped there, his body stretched diagonally across it. His face was bruised too, and he was wearing a stretched-out, ratty t-shirt and boxer shorts. Alex got down on one knee and got the lock open quickly, pulling the door open without bothering to stand up and shuffling forward on his knees instead to press his fingers to Max’s neck, checking for a pulse.

He stirred at Alex’s touch, pulse steady and even, and Alex patted his least bruised cheek sharply. “Max. Max, can you hear me? Max, wake up.”

“Is he awake?” Michael called from Isobel’s cell.

Isobel herself mumbled, “Max?” as Michael asked, and Alex shook his head in case she could see him through the open doors.

“Still unconscious. Max, come on, you’re huge, we need you awake for this jailbreak.”

“’Sobel,” Max murmured, and Alex leaned back as Max’s eyelids fluttered. “Ow. Michael?”

“I’m here!” Michael called, watery. “I’m right here, Max, I’m with Izzy, we’re recuing you, okay?”

“Gotta get out.” Max winced and closed his eyes. “Ahhh…can’t find you.”

“I’m here!” Michael skidded into the cell next to Alex, and his hands shook as they passed uncertainly over Max’s chest before gripping onto his shoulders and yanking him up into a tight hug. “I found you.”

“Michael?” Isobel called, frightened, and Michael gave Alex an anguished look that he nodded in response to, getting to his feet and going to check on her. “Michael…who…Alex Manes?” her face crumpled in confusion at the sight of him.

“Long time, no see, huh?” Alex knelt in front of her like Michael had. “He brought me in for backup. How’re you feeling, Isobel?”

“Bad.” Her eyes were clearing though, and her hands were tight on the edges of the bunk. “Are you helping us? You need to get Michael out; they mustn’t find him.”

“Well they can’t keep you either,” Alex said calmly. “Are you drugged, Isobel? Did they give you something?”

“Yeah. Sedated us.” She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them a second later. “Wake up for food. For experiments.”

“Okay. Do you feel nauseated? Headachy?”

“Sick,” she agreed, eyes sliding shut again. “Head hurts. Lights hurt. Feel kinda drunk. You’re here to help us get out?”

“Yeah, I am. Do you mind if I check your pulse real quick?”

“Yes,” she snapped, pulling her wrists up against her chest and giving him a look that made him lift his hands.

“Okay, that’s okay. Can you stand?”

“Maybe. Get Michael out.” She lashed out and grabbed onto his wrist too fast for him to jerk away in time. She leaned close, breath rancid and eyes wide. “He can’t be caught! They’ll keep him here too!”

“We’re all getting out,” he told her, holding himself still. “Can you stand, Isobel? Can you walk?” He could hear Max and Michael whispering to each other in the other cell, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

“Not Noah.” She squeezed his wrist, startlingly strong. “Leave him. He’s not…he’s dead. Deserves it. Leave him. Family only. I want Michael.” Tears welled up in her eyes and she raised her voice. “Michael! Max!”

“We’re here!” Michael called back, and Alex heard him choke back a sound that might have been a sob. “We’re here, we’re with you, we’re getting you out.”

“Let me bring you to them,” Alex said. “Let me up and I’ll help you.”

She held his gaze for a long moment before she nodded and let go of his wrist. He stood up and offered her his arm, suppressing a wince when she grabbed hold of it tight enough to hurt, nails digging in even through his jacket and shirt. He steadied her as she stood, and let her set the pace as she wobbled out of her cell on bare, dirty feet. She’d just caught her balance by the time she reached Michael and Max, and Michael reached up to catch her so she didn’t crack her knees on the concrete as she fell next to them and into the circle of their arms.

Alex backed away, something painful clawing at his chest as he watched them pull each other in and cling onto each other like the survivors of a shipwreck. Their heads bent together made a spectrum running from black to brown to blonde. Max and Michael pulled Isobel between them, and Michael whispered something, too low for Alex to hear.

It was too private for him to see anyway. He stepped out of the cell completely and listened for a moment at the crack of the main door, horribly aware of how loud they’d all been. He couldn’t hear anything, and he pulled the door a little closer to him, paranoid. That they hadn’t been caught yet was a miracle he didn’t plan on questioning, but they had to be ready. He had to be ready. 

At least a guard per prisoner, he’d thought, but maybe Project Shepherd was running on even less of a shoestring than he’d thought. There had to be someone here; someone had driven that jeep here. And unless they’d somehow missed something, they were going to come from the end of the corridor straight towards them when they noticed something was wrong. It could only be a matter of time, with what Michael had done to the camera.

His head throbbed in time to his pulse. The alien glass was still unusually warm against his skin, and he couldn’t stop thinking of the glass cabinets in the other room. He had absolutely no doubt at all that he would be having nightmares about reality glitches in the near future, and probably for a lot longer than that. He’d imagined what Michael saw to be more benign, more like the heat shimmer-type illusions he saw sometimes as part of a haunt.

There was absolutely nothing benign about what was in those cabinets. It felt deeply, deeply wrong, and not just because they had hurt to look at. There was something about it that was unsettling, maybe the idea of containing a haunt. Was that what they were? Had Project Shepherd figured out how to contain ghosts? To harness their energy, somehow, and weaponise it?

He looked behind him at the camera, and took a step backwards to check on Michael, Max, and Isobel. They were still holding onto each other tightly, whispering so fast it sounded more like a hiss. Alex jerked his head around at the unmistakable sound of a door opening and closing, and boots on the ground approaching the cellblock.

“Shit.” He grabbed the edge of the door to Max’s cell and whispered as he closed it, “It’s not locked, don’t panic, stay absolutely quiet.”

Isobel and Max looked furious and terrified respectively, but Michael nodded and held Isobel back from launching to her feet. Alex closed the hatch on them, shoved Isobel’s cell door and hatch closed, and turned around to face the back wall just in time for someone to wrench the main door open behind him and touch a gun to the back of his head. “Hands where I can see them! You are trespassing on private property!”

“Shit, oh my God.” Alex lifted his hands into the air, trying to make himself sound as freaked out as possible. “I’m sorry, I had no idea, I thought this place was abandoned! I was just exploring, I swear!”

“Turn around,” the voice instructed, low and hard. “Slowly.”

“Okay, okay.” Alex took a deep breath, then spun hard on the spot, knocking the gun sideways with his left shoulder and getting his arm over his attacker’s in the same smooth movement, both hands wrenching the gun away from him and finding their own holds on the grip as he twisted up to point it back at its owner. Turned out he could still disarm someone in about a second flat – points to him.

The man glaring at him was in Air Force fatigues with a Senior Airman insignia on his arm. His name, according to his pocket, was Williams. He was young, maybe early thirties, with short brown hair and tanned skin, and he hadn’t lifted his hands up. Alex raised an eyebrow. “Hands up, airman.”

“You have no idea what you’ve walked into,” Williams growled, raising his hands slowly. “Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you’ll get away with this?”

“You think you will?” Alex kept the gun trained on his chest. “This entire operation is illegal. Open the cell door to your left.” Isobel’s empty cell.

“It’s locked.”

“Is it?”

Alarm spread across Williams’ face like spilled ink. “You let them out?”

“Open the door and see for yourself.” Alex took a step back, putting a little distance between them in case Williams decided to charge him. “Now.”

Williams glanced at the door, then reached out carefully and pulled it open. “Jesus,” he breathed, seeing it was empty. “You fucking idiot, do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I guess that’s my problem now, not yours. Get inside.” Williams edged into the cell, and Alex moved to keep a clear line of sight on him. “Empty your pockets.”

Williams hesitated, eyes moving between Alex’s face and the unmoving gun. “You’re military, right? What branch?”

“Not your concern. Pockets, airman, now.”

Williams’ mouth twisted, but after a second he reached into his pockets and withdrew a phone and key card in one hand, and a set of keys in the other.

Alex nodded at the floor. “Put them down outside the door, to the side.”

“I’ll remember your face,” Williams said, starting to crouch, and Alex shook his head.

“On your knees, airman.” He didn’t want to get rushed. Williams scowled, but went down on one knee and leaned forward to put the objects down outside the door. “Stand up and sit on the bench.”

“You’re making a mistake.” Williams sat down, hands at his sides until Alex jerked the gun and he lifted them into the air again. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here. These aren’t ordinary prisoners, man. They’re not like us. They’re enemies of the state, I’m serious.”

“Me too.” Alex shifted the objects out of the way of the door with his prosthetic foot. “Stay sitting, airman.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Williams sneered, and his eyes widened in sudden fear as the keys rose into the air, lifted by an invisible force. “Oh my God.” Alex kept his hold on the gun and reached out to take the keys from the air, glancing at them quickly to figure out which one was the key to the cell. Williams had lifted his hands even higher. “You’re one of them.”

Alex found the right key and stepped back enough to close the door. “I’d rather be one of them than one of you.” The second he had to lower the gun he leaned his weight against the door, just in case Williams did try to make a break for it. Fortunately for all of them, he played it safe and stayed where he was, and Alex locked the cell without any incident. 

In the doorway of Max’s cell, Michael sat with Max and Isobel still holding onto him. “Okay?” he whispered, and Alex nodded, taking his finger off the trigger and sliding the keys into his pocket.

“Stay quiet,” he breathed, and motioned for the three of them to stay where they were. He pointed to himself and the gun, and the corridor Williams had come down. Michael nodded, though he didn’t look very happy about it, and Alex left them alone.

Finger back on the trigger, he approached the door at the other end of the corridor quietly. It was slightly ajar, and he couldn’t hear anything from it, but he still softened his steps as much as he was able.

For nothing, it turned out. The door opened onto a small office with a small TV set showing feeds of the outside of the front of the building and the floor of the cellblock. No cameras anywhere else, which must have been how Williams missed them. 

The office was very bare. Desk, chair, two monitors hooked up to a docked laptop, and not much else. The laptop was locked, but Alex figured he could steal it and break in later. He was thinking ahead, wondering which line of blackmail would be the best for when they would have to confront his dad, when the devil himself drove up in his black station wagon.

Alex didn’t freeze. He hurried back along the corridor to the cellblock and scowled when he saw that they’d left the cell, and Isobel was looking through the hatch of her old cell at Williams. “Hey!”

“Just a little payback.” She turned to face him and swayed heavily into Michael, who held her up and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “He’s out for the count.”

Alex glanced in through the hatch, and true enough, Williams was slumped on the bench, eyes closed. “You’re sure?” There wasn’t time to ask how.

“Deadly.” Blood started dripping from her nose, and Michael swore and yanked a bottle of nail polish remover out of his pocket.

“Iz, here.”

Max was leaning heavily against the wall, eyes closed, and Alex pushed his panic down. “My dad is here,” he told them. “I need you to stay quiet and say as little as possible, okay?”

“What’re you gonna do?” Michael demanded.

“Blackmail.” Alex beckoned for them to follow him out of the cellblock. “Hide in here.” He pulled open the door to the kitchen storage room and handed Michael his revolver. “I’m going to try and get him to follow me into the cellblock or the office at the other end. As soon as he can’t see you, I want you to start heading for the exit as quietly as you can.”

Michael shook his head. “Alex –”

“You agreed,” Alex snapped. “You said you trust me.” Beside them, Max made a quiet noise he couldn’t interpret, but Michael clenched his jaw and nodded. “As quietly as you can,” Alex repeated, and ushered them into the room before closing the door on them. He could hear footsteps echoing down from the floor above, and he went to lean against the wall directly opposite the stairwell, waiting. Only one set of footsteps – that was good. His dad had always underestimated him – that would help.

He breathed out and pulled on a smile as his dad came down the stairs and turned the corner. He was wearing his fatigues too – must have come straight from the base, or gone to the Project Shepherd bunker and seen he’d been robbed and rushed over. It was gratifying to see him stop in his tracks when he saw Alex. He hadn’t changed at all. Same thick neck, square face, blank expression. As he started walking down the last flight of stairs, Alex thought his hair might be paler at the sides, but it was still dark on top.

“Alex,” his dad said quietly.

“Hey, Sarge.” Alex smiled. He saw his dad clock the gun he was still holding at his side. “How’re things?”

“You shouldn’t be here. This is Air Force property.”

“Gee, Pops, not even a hello?” He kept smiling. “I haven’t seen you in, what, six years? Seven? I thought you might wanna catch up before jumping straight to business.”

“Alex.” His dad reached the bottom step. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but it isn’t safe. For your own good, you need to leave here right now, or you could be in a lot of trouble.”

The T-word. How often had ‘trouble’ been used as a justification for a punishment? Alex shrugged and pushed off the wall. “I was kinda hoping we could have a chat, actually. I’ve been finding out all sorts of stuff these last couple of days. I guess you don’t have any beers down here, wouldn’t want Williams and the others drinking on duty, but we could still talk, right?” He smiled again. 

“I don’t have anything to talk to you about.” His dad looked him up and down in the way that used to make Alex feel about an inch tall. “This is private property, Alex, and you aren’t an airman anymore. You can’t be here.”

“You’re right.” Alex agreed easily. “I’m not an airman. I’m a shade these days. I don’t know whether you knew that or not – not the profession you hoped I’d go into, I know, but that natural sensitivity you always hated comes in handy. And you know what, it’s funny, I got called in for a job in Roswell, and the place is absolutely overflowing with ghosts.” He pretended to laugh. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before in my life. And you know what’s even weirder? All my digging led to you. Funny, right? Y’know, considering how little you think of haunts and shades and all that. And then I track the origin of this spooky explosion back to this place, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I gotta ask, how’re you and Williams handling this? This place is haunted to a degree I’ve never seen before, and even someone with the sensitivity of a rock would be feeling it, but you two seem totally fine. So yeah, a lot to talk about.”

He saw his dad shift his weight, just a tiny bit, and turned away before he could decide to try and grab for him. “What is this, Alex?” Jesse asked, quiet and controlled as ever as Alex started walking towards the office.

“An investigation, I told you.” It took everything in him to keep his back to his dad, knowing he was armed, but the play worked. Jesse started to follow, and Alex walked into the office without looking back, making sure to stand in front of the open door so his dad wouldn’t be able to reach in and pull it shut on him. He gestured to the screens like he wanted to show his dad something, and Jesse walked in slowly, ever-present creases between his brows deepening when he saw it was empty.

“Where’s Williams?”

“Hiding behind the door at the other end,” Alex lied easily. “Can’t wait to see what’s in there, but I don’t know how soundproof that door is, and I really wanted some privacy.” He closed the door and leaned against it heavier than he needed to. Jesse’s gaze flicked up and down again, hopefully registering the way he was putting all his weight on his left leg.

“Privacy for what?” 

“Family legacy stuff. I know you –”

Jesse was still so quick. Alex barely managed to get out of the way and avoid being hit in the throat, his dad’s other hand pinning his right wrist at the perfect angle to keep the gun pointed at the ground. Alex was seventeen again, sixteen, fifteen, small and scrawny and weak. 

For the first time in his life he pulled the trigger of a gun without meaning to.

In the small space, the bang was explosive. Alex jerked his head back to avoid getting headbutted, got blocked when he tried to punch, couldn’t kick away, and let his knees buckle for a second. Just a second, just enough to drag at the grip his dad had on his right wrist, just enough to get underneath him and surge up again, shoving Jesse away.

That grip on his wrist was like iron though. His dad used his own momentum and tried to spin him around. Alex yanked back, almost dropped the gun, twisted to stop his dad getting his other hand on it, and kept twisting instinctively. 

Years of living under his father’s roof and learning his every tic and tell were finally paying off. Jesse didn’t manage to kick him again, and Alex kept twisting, even managed to get a hit in before Jesse kicked his prosthetic leg out from under him.

Alex went down but kept his grip on the gun and rolled into his dad’s legs. To avoid tripping, Jesse had to finally let go of his wrist, and Alex had the gun pointed at his chest in less than a second. Sprawled on his back on the floor he might be, but at least he still had the gun. They were both breathing fast, and Alex sat up slowly, his ears ringing.

“When I said I wanted to catch up, those weren’t really the memories I wanted to revisit.”

His dad’s lip curled, just a tiny bit. The most acknowledgement he’d ever get, probably. He reached for the door handle, and Alex jerked the gun. “Don’t.” His dad paused, then tilted his head, calculating, and wrapped his hand around the handle. Alex pulled his good leg underneath him, stump aching, and twisted as carefully as he could while keeping the gun trained on Jesse. “Don’t, Dad.”

Silence was the best way to get people to talk. His dad never spoke unless he had something to say, and that hadn’t changed. He pulled the door open, eyes on Alex, and Alex saw a shape in the corridor that he recognised instantly as Michael. He aimed high and shot through the top of the door. “Don’t move!”

His dad stilled, hand still on the handle, door still slightly open. “Who do you think you’re protecting, son?” he asked quietly. “I recognised that truck outside.”

The threat sent more adrenaline racing through Alex’s system than the struggle for the gun had. “All shades know each other,” he said, keeping his voice as even as he could manage. He twisted his bad leg and knelt up, slowly, slowly, until he could plant his good foot and rise slowly to his feet. “Everyone knows that.”

“Michael Guerin is a confirmed threat to national security,” his dad murmured. “We’ve been tracking him for years, Alex. He’s a terrorist on home soil.”

Alex swallowed his retorts. He knew not to rise to the bait. Never say more than absolutely necessary. “We? Who’s ‘we’, Dad? You and Williams? Who else is on your private payroll? Because I know this isn’t legal. I know this operation was shut down in 2010.”

That head tilt again. And Alex could still see Michael in the corridor, and couldn’t get a good look without giving him away, couldn’t tell him to run without giving him away. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat.

“You think you’re up to speed because you found the Roswell bunker and stole the archives?” That quiet disdain was the tone Alex’s own mind took when he was feeling at his lowest. “Alex, you have no idea. You have no idea what’s going on, or what they’re capable of. These creatures aren’t like you and me. They’re insidious murderers. You read those files; you can’t erase evidence just because you don’t like it.” He shook his head, calm and disappointed. “Seventeen murders in the last twelve years, and those are just the ones we know about.”

“Like you care,” Alex snapped, and railed at himself for it immediately. Too easy, letting himself get provoked, letting his dad see a chink in his armour.

“Do you think I would do this if I didn’t care?” His dad spread his hands, letting go of the door handle to do it, emphasising his point. “This is bigger than you and me, son. It’s bigger than this government, bigger than this country, even. This is about the entire planet.”

Alex had been immune to his dad’s inspiration act since he was thirteen, and he just shook his head. “Right. It’s about the whole human race. Us verses them. Humans against aliens, is that it?”

Jesse looked him up and down, again. Measuring and finding him wanting, as always. “I thought you of all people should understand,” he said softly. “This latest killing spree started with one of your friends. Rosa Ortecho.”

“Funny how it didn’t start a man hunt,” Alex said. Michael, infuriatingly, was creeping closer. Alex was doing everything he could to stall and keep his dad’s eyes on him, and Michael was still coming towards him like the idiot he apparently was. “Even though her death was before you were shut down. What happened? Kept your cards too close to your chest?”

His dad shook his head, that tiny curl to his lip bringing up a whole host of memories. Alex could hear it in his head, the number of times his dad had shaken his head like that and called him a child, a weak, pathetic excuse for a man. “Did you see what they did to your friend?” He asked, voice low. “Cold-blooded murder. You saw those files, son. Incident after incident of unprovoked violence –”

“Do _not_.” Alex’s voice shook, and he had to steady his own grip on the gun. “Don’t you dare, don’t you ever talk to me about unprovoked violence.” Not with Michael standing a few feet behind him.

“I’ve only ever done what has to be done.” His dad shook his head, and even though his disappointment had long stopped having an effect on Alex, his stomach still clenched in a Pavlovian response to the expectation of the punishment that always followed it. “You know that.” He turned, and Alex shouted, but it was too late – he’d seen Michael, and his hand was going for his gun.

Turned out Alex couldn’t quite bring himself to shoot his father in the back, but he was perfectly capable of rushing him from behind. He’d hoped to bring him to the floor, but Jesse was strong, stumbling into the wall instead and immediately lashing backwards with an elbow that caught Alex hard in the cheek. It smashed his head into the concrete wall, but he hooked a leg around Jesse’s and made himself dead weight, grabbing for his right arm to keep the gun pointed anywhere but at Michael.

Everything happened too fast. Michael shouted something, his dad’s gun went off twice, some invisible force shoved at him, trying to separate him from Jesse, but he was holding on too tight, and they both fell backwards through the door of the office. He twisted his gun to point inwards, muzzle aimed at his dad’s chest, and fired. At the same time, his dad’s gun went off again – into him.

Alex had never actually been shot before. Shot _at,_ plenty of times, but he’d never actually been shot. It hurt a lot more than he expected, and he lost his grip on his dad, whose weight on top of him suddenly seemed immense. It vanished before he could finish thinking about it, and Alex’s brain caught up and figured out what had happened after it had occurred, as Michael crashed down on his knees next to him. He’d blasted Jesse into the wall and knocked him out. There was blood on the floor underneath him. Alex craned his neck to see, but couldn’t make sense of it for a second until he remembered he’d gotten a shot off. Through and through, it had to be, with that amount of blood.

“Alex!” Michael touched his chest, his stomach, and Alex realised his own hands were pressed over a spot just below his ribcage, and they were wet. “Oh shit, Alex –”

“Ow.” Alex’s throat was wet, there was blood in his mouth. Bullet hit a lung, he figured distantly, but missed his heart. “Ah.”

“You’re gonna be okay,” Michael said, and Alex’s eyes fell shut. He felt unbelievably heavy, like he could sink right down through the floor to the centre of the planet. “Alex, come on, we just need to get you to Max, you’ll be okay.”

“Leg,” Alex breathed, eyes closed against the blazing sun. “My leg –” No, he was in New Mexico, he was stateside, he was with Michael. 

“Stay with me, okay?” Michael’s hand was shockingly hot against his face. “Alex, come on, wake up!”

“M’awake.” Alex opened his eyes for a second and couldn’t keep them open, not even to look at Michael. At least Michael was okay. At least Max and Isobel had escaped. “Liz,” he mumbled, breathless. “Tell Liz…’Ria, tell them…”

“Tell them yourself,” Michael snapped, and his hand left Alex’s face. Odd, how that seemed to hurt more than the cold pain in his chest, the awful dragging agony each breath was beginning to be. “Stay awake, I’ve got you.”

The world moved around him. Alex tried to breathe as shallowly as possible, keeping his eyes shut. He was dying. He was dying, and Michael wasn’t even touching him. That seemed unfair. 

“Michael,” he choked, and Michael was there, Michael’s hand was squeezing his and pressing it back onto his chest against the bullet wound. The pain bloomed sharp and immediate, and Alex gasped.

“It’s okay,” Michael said. “You gotta trust me now, alright? I don’t know much, but I know you’ve gotta keep pressure on that.”

“Michael.” Alex tried to open his eyes, and blinked at the way Michael was standing, walking quickly next to him, and Alex was flying? Floating. Michael’s nose started to bleed, and Alex made a weak sound of protest that made Michael squeeze his hand again.

“It’s okay,” he insisted. “Up the stairs, out to the truck, just stay awake for me, can you do that?”

He couldn’t even keep his eyes open. He couldn’t even speak. He couldn’t breathe either, it turned out. His throat was full of blood and the pain was starting to ebb away. Not a bad way to go, really. Even if it turned out he didn’t want to go at all. He couldn’t feel his fingers, and he couldn’t hear what Michael was saying anymore. Just the sound of his voice.

He was an idiot for never telling Michael how much he loved his voice. For never telling him how much he loved him. Alex tried, but all that came out was a choked gurgle. Bright purple and blue lights were flashing across the insides of his eyelids. He couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t feel if Michael was still holding onto him. He hoped he was. The lights started to fade, fireworks disappearing into darkness, and Alex’s last breath was more blood than air.

Alex jerked awake and sucked a huge breath into two functioning lungs. He was lying in the dirt, in the sun, and Michael was holding his head. Max and Isobel were kneeling by his feet. Michael’s mouth and chin were bloody. Alex twisted to reach up, realising it was from a nosebleed. “Are you okay?”

“Am _I_ okay?” Michael’s voice cracked, and Alex found himself pulled up into a tight hug, Michael’s face buried against his neck. “Am _I_ okay, what the hell is wrong with you, who asks that after they got shot?”

He’d been shot. Alex held onto Michael and shuddered through the realisation, kind of glad that their chests were pressed together so he couldn’t look. There was the sound of retching behind them, and Alex made himself ease back from Michael so he could turn his head to look. Max was on his hands and knees, puking up bile and water and not much else while Isobel rubbed his back, bare arms and legs dirty from sitting on the ground.

“You were meant to leave.” Alex pulled back from Michael properly and pressed his hand over the place where he’d been shot. “I was stalling for ages, why the hell didn’t you run!”

“I wasn’t leaving you down there with him!” Michael yelled back, tears and blood making his face a truly awful sight. “He could’ve killed you!” His shoulders hitched on a barely suppressed sob. “He did kill you!”

“We need to get out of here,” Isobel said, voice sharp even if she still looked a bit unsteady. 

“No.” Alex pushed himself up onto his knees, testing the strength of his leg. His stump didn’t ache at all. He felt good, actually. Fresh and fit. He rose to his feet and looked at the open back door of the Penvale facility. “I need to check my dad.”

“Are you serious?” Michael snapped. “We just got you away from him!”

“I need to check him.” Alex looked back at them. “You three get in the truck and bring it round to the front. I won’t be long.”

“I’m coming with you.” Michael got up too, staggering like a drunk. He wiped a hand across his face and only succeeded in smearing blood up his cheek.

“What about us?” Isobel demanded, still kneeling in the dirt next to Max, who was ashen and barely conscious.

Michael stumbled towards his truck and reached into the back. He produced a plastic bag and pulled two bottles of nail polish remover out of them, wobbling on his feet as he came back to Isobel to hand them to her. “One each,” he said. “I’ll be right back, I promise.”

“I’m sticking with you,” she warned, and Michael nodded, touching her head. 

“You look after Max. We’ll be quick, right, Alex?”

“Right.” Alex gestured to the open door. “Quick, Guerin, come on.” He paused and waited for Michael to catch up, and reached out to steady him when he nearly tripped. “You don’t have to come with me,” he said quietly.

“I’m not letting you go in there alone,” Michael said stubbornly. He swayed into Alex though, and Alex slid an arm around his back to hold him upright as they went inside. It was just for practicality, he told himself. It didn’t mean anything.

“Are you okay?” he asked quietly as they got to the stairwell. “You don’t seem so good.”

“I’m fine. I’ll throw up when we get outside again.” Michael gripped the handrail tightly as they hobbled down the stairs like they were playing a three-legged race.

His dad was still lying prone in a pool of blood on the floor in the office. Alex couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t look like he was breathing. Michael’s arm was heavy over his shoulders, and Alex tightened his grip around his side as they walked forwards slowly. “Stay here,” Alex said as they reached the doorway. “I just need to check his pulse.”

“Alex…”

“I’ll be quick.” Alex slid out from under Michael’s arm and dropped down on his good knee next to his dad’s prone body. He knew, now, as if the blood hadn’t been enough of a clue. His dad’s eyes were slightly open, his lips parted, and he was absolutely still. The pulse point in his neck would be easy to find, but Alex hesitated to touch him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever voluntarily touched his dad. He couldn’t even imagine a time he would have had to. He’d certainly never wanted to. 

Stalling for time, he checked his dad’s pockets first. He found his wallet, his phone, and his keys. He took all three, figuring they might all come in handy later. 

“Alex?” Michael was leaning against the doorframe behind him, and Alex nodded, reaching forward and pressing his fingers to his dad’s neck.

His skin was still warm, but there was no pulse. Alex kept his fingers there for several seconds, then checked his wrist too, just to be absolutely sure.

“Is he –?”

“He’s dead.” Alex dropped his wrist and pushed himself to his feet, something strange settling in his chest. He stepped away and went to check the laptop, and checked the desk drawers while he was at it. There were several memory sticks he pocketed, and a few notebooks he flicked through and decided to take as well. Leaving them on the desk, he went to check the three doors he hadn’t had time to look behind earlier.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked as he slipped past him.

“I’m fine.” It was true. Alex paused and met his eyes, just for a moment. “I’m fine,” he said again, quiet and reassuring. “I need to check these rooms, then we’re done, okay?”

Michael nodded, wiping his face again. There was blood all over his hand now, and he’d gotten it across his forehead like macabre warpaint. When the first door Alex opened led into a small bathroom, he beckoned Michael forward. “You should clean up. Anyone who sees you on the drive back is gonna freak out if they see you like that.”

“Like what?” Michael edged his way into the bathroom and hissed when he saw his face. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Alex’s lips twitched. “Not your best look.” Michael was staring at him, so he ducked out to check the next door, which was a tiny janitor’s closet. The next was another storage room, and Alex didn’t know whether he should be disappointed or not that it was completely empty.

Michael appeared in the doorway, face dripping wet but clean. “More files?”

“Nothing. I guess stuff’s either been moved or digitised – let’s hope for the latter.” He backed out and closed the door, giving the handle a frown. “We should wipe this place down.”

“Come again?”

“My prints are on file, and so are yours. We need to wipe this place down, and we need to remove Noah’s body. We’ll have to come back for your pods.”

Michael looked like he was on the verge of asking why for a second before he nodded and looked down the corridor. “Okay…we didn’t touch much, just door handles. I’ll wipe down everything upstairs, puke in a bush, chug some acetone, and help you move Noah. Sound good?”

Alex couldn’t even express how relieved he was that Michael had a good head in a crisis. “Sounds good. I’ll crack this laptop and see if it’s hooked up to some sort of intranet or server drive.”

Michael nodded and glanced back at the cellblock. “What’re we gonna do about the guard?”

“Leave him. We’ll call in an anonymous tip, cops’ll show up before he starves.” If he suffered a little in the meantime, Alex wasn’t going to shed tears about it, and he doubted the others would either. 

Michael nodded again and gave him a lingering look Alex couldn’t interpret before heading back towards the stairwell.

In the quiet, Alex briefly considered thinking about how he’d killed his own father and failed to save Noah.

No, he decided. Later.

The laptop was tragically easy to get into, and Alex allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction when he saw that it was remotely networked to a server drive, as he’d hoped it would be. It was easy to copy everything onto the laptop’s hard drive. While that ran, he went to the kitchen room at the other end of the hall and got a pair of latex gloves and a box of wipes, and started going over everything he or Michael might have touched. Handles, door frames, the floor of Max’s cell, all of it.

Williams was still out cold, and Alex hesitated before pushing open the door to the operating theatre, or whatever it was. It was easier to look at Noah than the glass cabinets, which were making his teeth hurt just having them in his periphery. He turned to put his back to them and went closer to examine Noah’s body.

He saw then, what Michael had meant about his chest. He might not have been hugely familiar with the way things should look inside a human torso beyond the obvious heart, lungs, and intestines configuration, but he was pretty damn sure human organs didn’t have bits that shimmered.

This close, he could smell the cold meat scent of Noah’s flesh, and he shivered. At least the man’s eyes were closed.

He was checking the cabinets under the countertops closest to him, keeping his eyes firmly averted from the other end of the room, when Michael came back. “Looking for something?”

“A body bag, or a sheet.” Alex straightened, frowning. “I’m not sure how we’re going to move him otherwise. Can you check the cupboards at the other end? I can’t go too close to those cabinets.”

“Sure.”

Alex went to check the doorway out of habit more than anything else. “Are Isobel and Max okay?”

“Not really.” Michael cleared his throat. “Noah…it’s complicated. Iz told me some of it, but I need the full story.”

“She said he deserved to die.” Alex frowned, not liking the way he couldn’t look in Michael’s direction. “What happened? Did he turn on them? Did he confess to being the murderer Project Shepherd was looking for?”

“It’s complicated.” Michael made a quiet sound. “I found sheets.”

“Bring them over, all of them. What do you mean, complicated?”

“I mean she’s still got a lot of drugs in her system and I don’t want to tell you anything that’ll make you think she’s a murderer when she isn’t.” 

Alex turned around as Michael came back to his side of the room and winced when he accidentally caught a flash of the cabinets in his peripheral vision. If they had been in a normal haunted building, he would have expected the space around them to be darker, the shadows deeper. As it was, the space was almost aggressively normal. Like a gross absence of what should have been there.

He filed that thought away to deal with later and helped Michael unfold three sheets onto the floor next to the mortuary table, with a forth cut into strips laid crosswise underneath them. “I can move him,” Michael said before Alex could tell him to take Noah’s feet. He grunted with the effort, but Noah’s body slid sideways off the table and sank slowly onto the sheet. Alex grabbed his arm when he swayed, and squeezed it.

“No more, Guerin. You’re wiped.”

“You gonna carry him up those stairs on your own?” Michael challenged.

“If I have to, yes.” Alex scowled at him. “Which would mess you up more right now: helping me drag him physically, or using your powers?”

Michael took a deep breath and looked down at Noah’s mutilated corpse. “Probably my powers.”

“Okay. Then you can help me lift him, but you can’t do that if you pass out or throw up again.”

They wrapped Noah’s body and used the strips of the fourth sheet to tie the bundle as tight as possible, and Michael took his feet while Alex took his shoulders. They had to put him down three times on the way out of the building to let Michael catch his breath, but eventually they got him out to the truck, which was still parked around the back. Max and Isobel were in the cab, and Alex left Michael with them while he went back into the building to give the operating room one last wipe down and get the laptop, which now had the contents of the entire Project Shepherd server drive downloaded onto it.

He wiped down both guns while the laptop shut down, and left them by his dad’s corpse. He gave it one last look before he took the laptop and notebooks away, a strange sensation growing in his chest. Michael had moved the truck out to the front of the building, and he didn’t protest when Alex opened the door on the driver’s side and climbed up. It was a tight squeeze with all four of them crammed on the bench, Isobel squashed between her brothers. Max seemed to be unconscious again, but as far as Alex was concerned, as long as he was alive, they were doing well.

He finally realised as he drove them away from Penvale that the odd feeling in his chest was lightness. It only increased when they got back on the dirt road, and when they hit the highway Alex had to hold back a smile. Michael was pressed against his side, whispering something to Isobel Alex couldn’t quite make out over the rumble of the engine, they were all alive, and Jesse Manes was dead.

Jesse Manes was dead. His father was dead.

Alex breathed out and felt like it was the first time he was doing it.

The can of worms he’d uncovered was huge, and the situation was far from over, but Alex had honestly never felt so free. Not even when he’d left the Air Force.

Maybe he’d feel guilty later, or guilty about his lack of guilt, but right now he just felt relief. His father would never touch him again. He would never hurt him again.

They left the highway before they hit Roswell to drive out into the arroyos and bury Noah’s body. Michael insisted he could do it, and since they didn’t have any shovels, Alex really hoped he was right. Michael had passed out for at least an hour on the ride, and said the sleep had helped. Alex watched, irritatingly helpless, as Michael leaned against the outside of the truck and looked at Noah’s wrapped body on the ground. 

It started so slowly that Alex almost didn’t notice at first. He didn’t really know what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been for the earth to shift around Noah, to sift aside with quiet shushing sounds like Michael had somehow persuaded it to become sand. Noah’s body sank, inch by slow inch, the dusty earth pulled up over him like iron filings to a magnet.

Behind Michael, Isobel leaned out of the window and wrapped an arm tightly around his shoulders, holding him up or just holding on. She watched the process as fiercely as he did, and Alex pretended to turn away when he saw tears spill down her cheeks. Her expression stayed tight, almost angry, and Alex wondered when he was going to hear the ‘complicated’ story Michael had hinted at.

Back to Roswell first. Regroup, rest, recover. 

The earth settled over the place Noah’s body had been, but Michael kept glaring at the spot. One of his knees buckled, and Alex darted in quickly, ignoring Isobel’s hiss of displeasure. Michael let him slide an arm around his waist to hold him steady and coughed, “Not done yet. Gotta get him deeper.”

“Don’t push yourself,” Alex said quietly. “We can come back later if we need to.”

“No.” Michael closed his eyes and leaned his head against Isobel’s. “Gotta do it now. Nearly there.”

Alex had so many questions. How Michael was manipulating the structure of the earth under their feet so there wasn’t even a bump where Noah had sunk down, how he knew how deep he was, how he’d broken up the dry ground into sand and somehow reformed it.

Questions he was sure the Project Shepherd scientists would have asked.

He kept his mouth shut and let Michael lean more and more of his weight into him until he finally slumped. A heavy drop of blood rolled down from one of his nostrils, and Isobel made a distressed sound. “Michael!”

“S’fine.” Michael didn’t open his eyes. Isobel and Alex were the only things holding him up now, and Alex hooked two fingers under Michael’s belt and dragged him up.

“There’s a towel in the glove box,” he told Isobel. “If you let go, I can hold him up till you get the door open.”

She nodded and slid back into the cab, letting go of Michael slowly. Alex twisted in front of Michael and hugged him against his front, pulling until Michael was leaning on him instead of the truck. He was horribly heavy, and Alex planted his feet, metal and real, and willed Isobel to hurry. He had to drag Michael sideways a little to give Isobel space to open the door, but then between the two of them they managed to get Michael back into the cab.

“You gonna puke?” Isobel asked in a low voice, and Michael nodded. Alex shifted back out of the way just in time for him to lean out through the open door and retch. After Penvale, there didn’t seem to be anything left in him to bring up, but he still heaved miserably and spat onto the ground a few times. 

“Ugh.”

“Water in the footwell,” Alex told Isobel, who nodded and pulled Michael back into a sitting position before finding it and helping Michael to drink. One hand on the bottle, she opened the glove box with the other and pulled out the towel, and wiped Michael’s face between sips. There was no headrest on the seat in the cab, so she pulled Michael to lean back against her own body, his curls crushed against her neck.

“It’s over,” she murmured, tilting the bottle with painful care so that not a single drop spilled. “You did it, it’s all done. We’re safe now. No one will ever touch us again. Take a nap, Michael. Do a Max and pass out again for a bit, you deserve it.”

“Not yet.” Michael opened his eyes blearily to look at Alex. “Where’re we going now? Cameras outside Max’s and Isobel’s. My bunker?”

“I have a better idea.” Alex slid his hand into his pocket to touch his phone. “It’s having roof repairs done right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s empty.”

“What?” Michael frowned at him, and Alex raised an eyebrow.

“Kyle’s staying out at his dad’s cabin right now, remember? There’s a condo with zero ties to any of us sitting vacant, and he owes you a favour.”

“Kyle?” Isobel frowned. “Kyle who?”

“Kyle Valenti.” Michael sighed and nodded. “Alright. You got his number?”

“Yeah.”

Michael kept his eyes closed while he called Kyle, but managed to sound completely himself when he spoke. “Hey, Valenti, it’s me. Yeah. I’m calling in that favour. Nothing big, don’t freak out – my trailer’s water tank has busted, I need a place to stay for a night or two. Yeah. Well, I figured why get a motel when I know a doctor with a fancy condo who owes me a favour? I’ll leave it as I found it, don’t worry. You got a doormat? Just leave the key under that, I’m outta town right now.” He sighed. “Yeah. Uh huh. Oh my God, Valenti, I know how a kitchen works, I’m not an alien.” 

Alex bit back a smile, and Michael cracked open an eye to see it, managing a tiny smirk in response. “Yeah. Alright, thanks, man.” He hung up and let his arm flop into his lap. “I need food. And nail polish remover. Like, a gallon of it.”

“I will buy you as much as the closest store will sell,” Alex promised, leaning against the truck. “When did he say he’d leave the key?”

“On his way outta town. He’d just gotten off his shift, or whatever, so I don’t know. An hour to be safe?”

Alex nodded and climbed up into the truck. The sun was starting to set, and it would take them at least forty minutes to drive the remaining distance to Roswell. “We can get food and nail polish remover on the way, and swing by your trailer to get anything you need.”

“Got spare clothes for you guys,” Michael mumbled, trying to push himself back into Isobel to give Alex more space.

“It’s a plan.” Alex slammed the door and turned the engine over. “We’ll eat, use Kyle’s shower, you guys can sleep, and then I want to hear everything, okay? Before we go back and get your pods.”

“What does that mean?” Isobel asked, sharp and wary.

“Well I’m kinda curious about how pissed you seem to be at your dead husband, who none of you knew was an alien. I’m also really interested in the cover-up you guys orchestrated for Rosa Ortecho’s murder.”

“It was Noah.” Isobel’s voice wobbled, with grief or anger Alex couldn’t tell. “It was all Noah. He _used_ me, he piloted my body like it was a fucking sports car.”

“Iz,” Michael whispered. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay!” And those were definitely tears, Alex could hear them even if he was keeping his eyes on the road. “He used my body to murder someone, Michael! Someone I didn’t even know I knew! There is nothing _okay_ about this!”

“Or you could tell me now,” Alex said, keeping his tone light. “Whichever you prefer.”

“And why the hell should I tell you?” Isobel snapped. “Why shouldn’t I just get in your mind and make you forget the last week even happened?”

“Iz!”

Cold fear gripped Alex’s stomach, but he didn’t show it. “Can you do that?”

“Well I killed my husband, so I think I’m capable of pretty much anything right now.”

“Isobel! Alex is on our side, okay?” Michael’s bulk shifted against Alex’s side, but he didn’t give into temptation to look away from the road. “He’s on our side.”

“His father is the one who did this to us.”

“Yeah, and he also shot Alex in the chest!” Michael sighed in the quiet that followed. “We can trust him. I trust him.”

The silence continued, and Alex wondered whether Isobel was carrying on the argument between her and Michael’s minds. He decided to let it go, and kept his eyes on the road, thinking ahead to their next steps.

Getting the pods back was the priority now. Finding a new location for them was of almost equal importance. The original cave site was compromised, and in Alex’s opinion, keeping them hidden in an unsecured cave was idiotic anyway. The problem was that there weren’t many other options. The sheer size of them made moving them difficult enough. They wouldn’t be able to get them into a house without taking doors off. Michael certainly didn’t have anywhere to hide them.

He could hire a van to move them, and they would brainstorm a place to hide them when they got to Kyle’s. One step at a time.

Dusk had fallen by the time they approached Roswell, and on a hunch, Alex pulled the shard of alien glass out between the buttons of his shirt, so it wasn’t touching his skin. The effect was slow to build, but in a way it was strangely reassuring after the unnatural activity he’d seen at Penvale.

The sky was turning a deeper blue, the clouds streaked with violet and pink, orange and red. What had looked beautiful just a minute before now seemed garish and sinister, the clouds hiding threats. They passed an abandoned-looking house, and Alex actually smiled when he saw a tall black figure standing outside it, all shadow and sulking malice.

He tucked the glass back into his shirt and headed for Sanders’ Auto Salvage. If the haunting activity in Roswell was still amplified, that meant it had to be the pods that had caused it to go haywire the way it had. Another thing to ask Isobel and Max about, though he was inclined to take a slightly gentler approach on that topic. Whatever the story was with Rosa and Noah, Isobel and Max had been imprisoned and experimented on, and Alex didn’t want to exacerbate the trauma any more than he absolutely had to.

Isobel was the one who got out of the truck when they got to the junkyard. “Stay,” she told Michael firmly. “I don’t trust you to stand up without falling over. Keep an eye on Max.”

Michael snorted, but shuffled back into her place obediently. “Yeah, he’s a real handful right now.” Max hadn’t so much as stirred the whole way back, but since Isobel and Michael didn’t seem worried, Alex had decided not to either. “You know where everything is.”

Isobel picked her way over to Michael’s trailer and waited for Alex to follow with the keys. The first thing she did when she got inside was wash her hands, massaging soap into her skin with a sigh of relief. Alex kept his distance from her as much as possible in the small space, not wanting to crowd her even as he edged past to grab his spare liner and his toothbrush from the bathroom. She knew Michael’s closet better than he did anyway; that much became immediately obvious when she opened one of the drawers under his bed and pulled out a duffle bag. 

Alex watched in silence as she filled it quickly and efficiently with the spare clothes Michael had picked for her and Max, getting stuff for Michael as well. She left Noah’s clothes untouched. There was a drawer inside the closet that belonged to her, it seemed, and she emptied the contents of that into the bag as well before going to the bathroom to get Michael’s toothbrush and toothpaste, and his shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel as well.

“We’ll need to stop by somewhere to get toothbrushes for me and Max,” she said, and gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Have you been staying here with him?”

She’d seen him grab his things, he realised, and actually had to stop himself from taking a step back. Isobel was filthy, greasy-haired, and wearing nothing but a nightgown, and she was still managing to project an intimidation level most staff sergeants could only dream of achieving. Possibly because Alex had never met a staff sergeant who could erase memories.

“Yeah,” he said simply. “Do you have everything?”

She gave him a long, hard look, then nodded. She grabbed Michael’s laptop off the table and shoved it into the bag before zipping it up. “Let’s go.”

Alex let her out first and locked the trailer door behind him, crutches held precariously under one arm. At least Isobel didn’t seem to be about to claw his eyes out, though she held herself very still when he sat next to her in the truck. 

As promised, he took them through a McDonald’s on the way back, and stopped the truck briefly to go into a pharmacy and buy an entire box of nail polish remover. The teenage cashier didn’t even give him a second look. By the time he got back into the truck, Isobel had eaten all her fries and half of Max’s, since he wasn’t awake to protest the theft, and she and Michael were squabbling over the correct ratio of burger to bun. They stopped as soon as he got in, each of them cracking open bottles of nail polish remover and drinking with visible relief.

Alex tuned them out and headed for the Raintree Complex. Michael told him when they pulled into the parking lot that they were looking for number 5, and Alex parked appropriately. Kyle wasn’t the only one having his roof repaired – most of the condos had scaffolding up around them. Hopefully Kyle didn’t have nosy neighbours, and the darkness would cover how beaten up they all looked if anyone did look outside in the next two minutes.

Isobel woke Max, and Alex suspected there was some psychic link at work there, because he hadn’t twitched the whole way back but all Isobel had done was squeeze his shoulder and whisper his name. She helped him inside and Alex helped Michael, and came back on his own to get the bags.

Kyle’s condo was perfect. Spacious and clean with a large master bedroom and a couch that could unfold into a bed. The fridge had milk for coffee, and the coffee machine itself looked like it had been designed by NASA. The ensuite bathroom had an impressively large shower cubicle with – Alex sighed in relief when he saw – a detachable showerhead, so he would be able to sit down while he showered, even if it had to be on the tiled floor.

They ate at the dining table, the smell of acetone almost overpowering the smell of the food, and Alex hooked his dad’s phone up to his laptop and worked with one hand while eating with the other. “All work and no play,” Michael muttered as he sat next to him, and Alex shook his head.

“Gotta make sure no one else from Project Shepherd is scheduled to take over a shift tonight. Looks like Williams was scheduled on to cover until six tomorrow morning, so I need to make sure whoever was going to take over from him doesn’t do that. We need at least another day to get the pods.” He tilted the phone screen to show Michael one of his dad’s many inboxes. “Looks like there’s a rota of ten.”

“What’re you gonna tell whoever’s meant to show up at six?” Michael asked, frowning.

“That there’s been a change of plan.” Alex shrugged. “My dad never explains anything unless there’s something in it for him, or he absolutely has to.” He blinked. “Had to.” He’d deal with his lack of guilt later, he decided, looking back at the phone and typing out an email to Samuel Rodriguez, the next person on the rota, telling him not to come to the site in the morning.

“I’m calling the first shower,” Isobel said, mouth full of burger. “I’ll fight any of you for it.”

“It’s yours, Iz,” Michael smiled, slumped in his chair. “Just try to leave some hot water for the rest of us.”

“I’m not making any promises. Have you seen the state of my hair? It’s so greasy it _itches_. You’d think they could at least spring for dry shampoo if they had the budget for alien experimentation.”

“My dad’s never been too big on grooming regimens.” Alex ate his last fry and looked across the table at Isobel, who was giving him another long look through narrowed eyes. He set his dad’s phone aside and closed his laptop.

“Iz.” Michael leaned forward. “Don’t.”

“He won’t even feel it.”

“_Don’t,_” Michael said again, louder. “I’m serious, leave him alone.”

“I need to be sure,” she snapped, and Alex leaned back in his chair, hoping to appear as unthreatening as possible.

“Sure of what?” he asked. 

“Whether we can trust you.” She straightened, and Alex held up his hands in surrender, stalling.

“Right, I dropped everything to come back to a town I hate, sneaked around with Guerin for half a week, and helped you bury a body, but sure, I can’t be trusted.”

“Isobel.” Max finally spoke up, and they all looked at him. He still looked pretty out of it, but he’d put his food away and chugged half a bottle of nail polish remover, and when he touched Isobel’s arm it was gentle and deliberate. “I’ll feel it if he’s bad. Give it twelve hours, and we’ll know.”

Alex stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“That’s too long,” Isobel insisted, giving him a wary look. “We need to know now! He could call someone to come and get us, he could put us right back in a cell.”

“What do you mean you’ll feel it?” Alex demanded, ignoring her.

“Max’s healing hands create a psychic link,” Michael explained. “Only lasts a few days, don’t worry. It’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal?” Alex pressed his palm to his chest where the bullet had hit. “I think that’s a pretty big deal, Guerin!”

“It’s not a full connection,” Max said, deep and oddly reassuring. Alex could imagine him as a good cop, oxymoronic as the idea might be. “And it goes both ways. We won’t be able to read each other’s minds or anything like that. It’s just echoes of emotions, real faint. Probably anyway,” he added. “I’ve never healed a human before. But that’s how it works with Michael.”

Michael shrugged when Alex looked at him. “It’s barely there. But like, he’d probably be able to tell if you secretly hated us and thought we deserved to die.”

Max was going to be able to feel Alex’s feelings for Michael. Alex considered that, and for a hysterical moment wondered whether it would have been better if they’d let him die.

“Great,” he said, as flat as he could. “Can’t wait for that.”

“Well, given the choice between dying and a minor psychic link with my brother, which would you have picked?” Michael snapped.

Alex sighed. “I get it, I just wasn’t expecting it. I haven’t thanked you yet,” he added, looking at Max. “Thank you.”

“Seems like fair play to me.” Max shook his head. “You helped rescue us. Seems like the least I could do.”

“The handprint will take too long.” Isobel said quietly, eyes on Alex. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t trust anyone right now except Max and Michael. I don’t know you. The last time I saw you was in _high school,_ and your dad kidnapped me from my _bed_. My husband was a murderous alien hiding right under my nose, taking my body out for joyrides like I was some sort of sock puppet, so my judgement is obviously pretty impaired. I need to be sure you’re with us, and I can find out so easily you won’t even feel it.”

Alex lifted a hand to stall Michael’s objections. “How?”

“I’ll go into your mind.” She relaxed a fraction, encouraged. “You won’t even know I’m there. You can’t lie in your own head, so I’ll just ask a couple of questions and leave, and that’ll be it.”

Alex literally could not imagine a more terrifying power, other than actual mind control. Michael’s telekinesis was practically benign compared to this. “No.”

She hadn’t expected him to refuse, and for a second she looked shocked before outrage took its place. “But –”

“I would rather you kept me under armed surveillance for the next twelve hours,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “I don’t want anyone in my head except me, especially if I won’t be aware of it.”

Isobel frowned. “I get that,” she said after a second. “So, what if you were aware of it? And we agreed on the questions beforehand?”

With anyone else, Alex would have refused again. But Isobel, they both knew, was the only one in the room who actually understood what it was like to have someone in her head without being aware of it. If she was telling the truth about Noah, that was, but so far Alex was inclined to believe her.

“What would you ask?” he said, not saying yes yet.

“I’d ask whether we can trust you,” she said immediately. “And why you’re helping us.”

“Could I ask you something in return?”

“You could, but I’m the one in control in there, so I could lie. There wouldn’t be much point.”

It wasn’t fair, but it made sense. Alex considered it, then nodded. “Okay. Two questions, and I’m aware the whole time.”

“Done.” Isobel’s eyes met his, and the world around them shimmered and softened. “Still aware?”

“I…think so?” Alex felt kind of ill, like he was in a dream or hallucinating. He looked around the room, trying to keep his cool. “Does it always look like this?” It was like they were inside a water droplet. The air around them seemed to sparkle, the colours of Kyle’s condo fractured and magnified in pastel shades. He could see the shapes of Michael and Max, but no details. Everything beyond the lights was blurred and indistinct, like an impressionist painting. 

“Pretty much. Ready for question one?”

“Yeah.” He looked back at Isobel, who looked much more put-together in whatever mental space they were sharing. Her hair was smooth and clean, and it looked like she was wearing makeup. 

“Can we trust you?” Her voice was deeper, and seemed to ring through his head like a bell.

The answer was dragged out of him before he could stop it. “Yes.” His heart started to beat faster. He’d never felt compelled to answer a question like that before, like there was no choice to the matter at all. It was frightening, but as long as Isobel stuck to the script, he could handle it.

Isobel breathed out, unsmiling. “Why are you helping us?”

Again, he spoke without consciously forming a response first. “For Michael, and for penance.” He heard himself say it and held his breath afterwards, fighting the urge to clap his hands over his mouth. He’d thought he’d say something about how it was the right thing to do, and yes, as a sort of atonement for the actions of his family. He could see Isobel’s desire to ask more questions, and held himself absolutely still, terrified that she would do it.

But the lights and blurriness died, and the real world faded back in around them. Michael’s hand was on his shoulder, and Alex was hyperaware of how close he was, how obvious it must be to Isobel how he felt. He looked down at the table rather than at any of them, and rubbed his hand over his mouth. 

“You okay?” Michael asked, pitched low, and Alex nodded.

“Penance,” Isobel said slowly, and Alex looked across at her.

“My family.” He swallowed. “You said it yourself – my dad’s the one who put you in those cells. My family helped cover up the crash. I’ve never played their games before. Why start now?”

“We appreciate it,” Max said seriously, and nudged Isobel. “If you want that shower, you’d better move fast. You aren’t the only one who hasn’t washed in over a week.”

Isobel looked at him, then nodded and got to her feet. “I’m sticking with you.”

“You always do.” Max smiled up at her with such easy fondness that Alex looked away. He waited until Isobel had slipped into the bathroom before asking.

“What does that mean, sticking with you? She said it to Michael too, when we were at Penvale.”

“Means she’s gonna keep her mind open to us,” Max said. “So she’ll feel it if anything happens, and we can call her if we need her.”

Alex nodded, looking over at the bathroom door, then back to Max. “Do you have any questions?”

“Nah. Michael trusts you, I trust you. And you did literally take a bullet for us.” Max shrugged a shoulder. “Michael said you’ve been helping him look for us. And he told you what we are and you didn’t run screaming.”

“I’ve seen scarier things than aliens in my life,” Alex said dryly, and Max smiled, eyes half-closed.

“I’ll bet. How long you been a shade? And a soldier before that.”

“Airman,” Alex corrected automatically, and nodded. “Yeah. Lots of scary things in the world. You guys don’t even rank in the top ten.”

Max grinned and yawned, which set Michael off as well. Alex swallowed his down and got up to clear the table. “I’ll make up the bed. You guys sit. Don’t even try and argue,” he added, seeing Michael open his mouth to protest. “Just concentrate on keeping your food down, Guerin. The last thing we need is for you to throw up on Kyle’s sheets.”

Isobel was quick in the shower, and Max went in after her. Alex had changed the sheets on Kyle’s bed and pulled out the couch bed, not entirely sure what the sleeping arrangements were going to be. Isobel decided it when she told Michael to join her and Max when he’d showered too, and he nodded without any argument. 

Alex practically shoved Michael through the bathroom door to take a shower after Max. He’d thought they might talk a little more after everyone had cleaned up, but when he went to take his turn in the shower (by which time only lukewarm water was left), Max was already asleep again in Kyle’s bed, Isobel lying next to him in a huge t-shirt and shorts she’d obviously taken from Michael’s closet.

There was no scar on Alex’s chest at all. He wasn’t even a hundred percent sure where the entry point of the bullet had been. He sat on the floor of the shower cubicle, showerhead in one hand, and rubbed his other over his front, like he would be able to feel where the wound had been.

He knew what it felt like to drown on land, in his own blood. 

He took a second to absorb that, and then balanced the showerhead over his shoulder and squirted some shower gel into one palm. If he got nightmares, he got nightmares. Hopefully they’d hold off for at least a night.

When Alex emerged, bag slung over his shoulder and crutches in his hands, Michael was curled up on Max’s other side, and Alex shared a nod with Isobel before he hopped out of the room and left them to it. He’d taken the alien ship shard off to shower, and felt the whole time like he was being watched. The feeling had vanished as soon as he put it back on, and he figured he was lucky he didn’t have to rely on Michael anymore for protection.

He still wanted to know the whole story about Rosa, but he couldn’t lie to himself and pretend he didn’t still want Michael. Maybe now more than ever.

Something to deal with later. 

It was still early, not even ten, so Alex sat at Kyle’s dining room table and opened the laptop he’d stolen from Penvale. Hopefully he would have more luck here than he had in the Project Shepherd bunker. A check of his dad’s phone showed that Rodriguez had emailed back in the affirmative too, so with any luck Penvale would remain untouched until Alex decided otherwise.

He remembered to message Maria to let her know he was safe, he and Michael had found his family, and they were all staying at Kyle’s. She demanded a photo as proof, and he sent one with a small smile, then another when she demanded one of him holding up three fingers. He loved her for her paranoia, and told her so. She sent back a photo of herself flipping him off, smiling.

He got his own laptop out to pull up the files he’d stolen from the Project Shepherd bunker, comparing back and forth. He opened one of the notebooks he’d stolen from Williams’ desk and started making notes in the back, eyes flicking between screens, skim-reading as fast as he could. 

He found the records of what they’d done to Max and Isobel. He found the records of the experiments they’d performed on them, and on their pods. He found a lot else besides, both that made his blood run cold and that made him sigh in relief.

He found his brothers’ names. They weren’t on the Penvale rota, but he’d still suspected. He couldn’t figure out what he was feeling as he stared at their names in the files. He’d suspected, but the confirmation was still bad. He couldn’t tell if it hurt though. It was kind of like how he felt about having killed his dad, like it hadn’t really happened, and if it had, what kind of monster was he for feeling relieved about it? 

He finally shut the laptops down around two in the morning, his eyes heavy and his mind overflowing. He left them and the notes he’d made out on the table and hobbled over to the sofa bed to collapse on top of it with a grateful noise. No bed had ever felt so comfortable, he was pretty sure. He was asleep in minutes, the shard of alien glass warm against his chest, just above where a handprint was beginning to form.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John Darnielle: I hate to say this, because, I don’t want to wish death on anybody, but...it’s wonderful when your abuser dies. It’s wonderful. It’s like nothing in the world. It’s like, you are free. There’s a feeling that you will never _be_ free of what you were. You know, there’s that. But there is this, you know...even though my stepfather was helpless at the end of his life, but to know that the person who used to hurt you no longer can. It’s very, very, very deep. It’s unbelievable.
> 
> Marc Maron: Do you forgive him?
> 
> John Darnielle: No. 
> 
> Excerpt from an interview with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats from Marc Maron's WTF Podcast, which you can listen to in its entirety [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WgT3ufLeHw) if you so wish. 59:30 is the timestamp this quote is from.
> 
> Your comments are feeding me in the best way, bless you all.


	7. Monday 30th August 2021

Alex woke up when the door to the master bedroom opened and Max emerged, his hair a bird’s nest and a pillow crease crossing his cheek. He smiled apologetically when he saw Alex. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s fine.” Alex sat up and rolled his shoulders. It was the fifth time he’d woken up anyway – three times from nightmares because apparently being shot really had freaked out his subconscious, and once when one of the alien trio had gotten up to piss during the night and flushed the toilet. “I’m a light sleeper. How’re you feeling?”

“Tired, still.” Max padded over to the kitchen, yawning. “You want coffee?”

“Please.” He was relieved when he got up and Max didn’t even look twice at his crutches or the exposed stump of his right leg. He’d always been a decent guy in high school, and that clearly hadn’t changed. He hopped to the smaller bathroom by the front door to piss, just remembering to grab his razor before he went so he could shave, and hopped back to the sofa bed to attach his leg afterwards. While Max’s back was turned he thought to pull up the front of his shirt to look at his chest. There was no handprint, but he could see an odd shimmer in a few places on his skin. Like body glitter, or something similar. He figured it was still coming up, like a bruise.

“Milk?” Max asked as he was rolling the liner up over his stump. “Sugar?”

“Milk, no sugar, thanks.” Alex scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, which he was sure was as much of a mess as Max’s. “Do you think Isobel will freak out if I go out to get us all some breakfast?”

“I’ll defend you,” Max said dryly, coming over with a full mug of coffee which Alex cradled in both hands, relishing the heat between his palms. “Especially if you happen to come back with bear claws.”

Alex snorted. “I’m pretty sure I can swing that.”

He drank his coffee and got dressed, and Max said Michael and Isobel would be up by the time he got back. Alex had to fight down the only-slightly irrational fear that they would all be gone when he got back, for all that he was the one with the truck and Michael was the only one of them with a phone. Still, it was a relief to get back to Kyle’s with four paper bags of pastries and find all three alien siblings where he’d left them.

“I feel like we should have separate powerpoints or something,” Michael said as Alex distributed the pastries and accepted another coffee from Max. “So we can get everything out on the table with the appropriate amount of clip art to soften the traumatic edges.”

“Good luck,” Isobel said darkly. “You’ve basically told him everything anyway.”

“Not everything.” Michael glanced at him. He was sitting next to Isobel this time, and Alex was next to Max. 

“Fill me in.” Alex reached for a croissant and shrugged. “I’m all ears.”

“What’s ‘everything’?” Max asked, and gone was the friendly guy who’d apologised for waking Alex up and offered him coffee. “I know you guys caught each other up on the way back yesterday,” he added, looking at Michael and Isobel, “but I missed all of that. So, lay it out for me.” He looked back to Alex. “Michael came and found you a few days ago. What happened next?”

Alex nodded slowly and reached for the notebook he’d been writing in last night. “I actually wrote out the timeline, as I understand it. Right from the beginning.”

“When we were kidnapped?” Isobel frowned.

“From the UFO crash in 1947.” Alex shrugged at their matching looks of disbelief. “I couldn’t sleep last night. And I know why the haunting activity in town is so screwed up, by the way. These guys wrote down everything.”

“Maybe skip to how we can fix that?” Michael suggested, but Alex shook his head.

“We’re doing this chronologically. So – 1947, your ship crashes outside Roswell. Harlan Manes is in charge of recovery at the site and he recovers a lot of what he and the other soldiers call ‘material’, which actually means physical debris from the wreckage, tech they salvaged from it, bodies, and survivors. The numbers are inconsistent, but I think it was between fifty and seventy five survivors, and between a hundred and a hundred and fifty bodies. At some point, at least one survivor managed to get away from the crash with all three of your pods and stashed them in a cave, before vanishing who knows where.”

Alex turned the notebook around so they could see the actual timeline he’d drawn. “You guys hibernate for fifty years. Meanwhile, Project Shepherd goes in hard on covering up the crash and exploiting everything they can from it. The survivors are kept locked up. Multiple sites are used. There might still be survivors.” He met their eyes, one by one. “We are going to check. 

“You guys emerge in 1997. Max and Isobel get adopted by the Evans family; Michael gets stuck in the system and gets moved back to Roswell in 2001. You didn’t give me an exact date for this,” he said to Michael, “but you said you were fourteen when Isobel was attacked, so I put that in 2014. Is that right?”

Isobel nodded, pale. “That’s right.”

“Good. Isobel is attacked, Max kills the attacker in self-defence, you cover it up.”

“Stop.” Max’s voice was harsh, but Isobel shook her head.

“It’s what happened.”

“Good point to slot in Noah’s part in the story though,” Michael said quietly. “That’s when the blackouts started. That’s when he started getting in.”

Alex raised an eyebrow and turned the notebook around again, ready to add to his timeline. “Oh?”

Max and Michael looked at each other, but it was Isobel who cleared her voice and spoke. “Noah survived the crash with his pod. He told me it was broken – you aren’t meant to be aware while you’re in them, but he was. He said it made him crazy. When…when that guy attacked me, he heard me screaming. In his head. He sort of…he sort of followed it back to me, I think, and he latched on, and after that every time I blacked out, he took over.” She shivered, and Michael got up from the table abruptly, chair scraping on the tile floor.

Alex watched him with alarm, but he only went into the bedroom for a second before returning with a sweater that he gave to Isobel, who took it without a word. “When did he tell you this?” Alex asked her.

“Chronological,” she said, quiet but firm. “We’ll get to it, right? What’s next on your line?”

He looked down, even though he knew. “2008. Rosa’s murder.”

Isobel nodded. “I blacked out a lot that year. Noah probably had my body about a third of the time I was awake, and apparently he fell in love with Rosa Ortecho.” Her lip curled, hands curling into the sleeves of the sweater. “I don’t even remember it. There’s whole parts of my life that he showed me that I wasn’t even there for.”

Michael squeezed her shoulder, and she leaned into him a little. Alex just nodded. “Did he show you what happened?”

Isobel swallowed and nodded. “He told her what we are. He wanted her to run away with him, but she was smart, I guess. She figured out something wasn’t right. He wanted to impress her – Kate and Jasmin were being mean to her, trying to make her give them drugs, so he killed them. And then when Rosa freaked out he killed her.” Her eyes were swimming with tears, her expression unpleasantly blank. “He used my body to basically stalk and murder her, with powers I didn’t even know I had.”

If it was an act, it was outstanding. Alex twirled his pen around his fingers and nodded. “Okay. 2008. Noah uses Isobel to commit a murder. Max and Michael help cover it up, and Michael takes the blame. Fast forward to 2021 –”

“No.” Isobel cut him off and took a deep breath, lifting her eyes to look at Max. “There’s more. There’s Liz.”

From Max and Michael’s expressions, Alex realised that whatever this was, Michael knew and Max was the one in the dark. He stared at Isobel with a little divot between his eyebrows, lips parted. “Liz?”

Michael’s hand tightened on Isobel’s shoulder. “Izzy –”

“No.” She wiped her eyes and looked at him, then Max. “No more secrets. All cards on the table. Max, I sent Liz away that summer. I got in her head and I forced her to leave town early, and I told her never to come back.”

Max looked poleaxed. He opened and closed his mouth, leaning back in his chair, eyes wide and hurt. “What…”

“Why?” Alex asked, genuinely baffled. “Did she know something?”

“She would’ve done.” Isobel pursed her lips, darting guilty little looks at Max like she was scared he would start shouting at her. “It was too risky.”

“Max would’ve told her,” Michael said quietly. “We’d just covered up her sister’s murder and everyone was attacking her family and Max wouldn’t’ve been able to watch her grieve without wanting to do something about it. We knew, so we did what we had to.”

“What you _had to?_” Max’s voice was rough with anger and unshed tears. “You _violated_ her! What the hell is wrong with you?”

“We gave her a push!” Michael snapped, leaning closer to Isobel, who’d flinched from Max’s words. “She was leaving anyway, everyone knew she had her road trip planned! You made the rules our whole life, just once we made a game-time decision, okay? It was for your own good.”

Max shoved himself back from the table, expression thunderous, and Alex, attuned as ever to currents of violence in a room, cut in. “2008, Isobel sends Liz Ortecho away from Roswell to protect her family.” Max looked down at him, and there were tears in his eyes as well. Alex met his gaze without flinching. “It makes you guys one for one on keeping secrets. You and Michael hid the truth of Rosa’s death, Isobel and Michael hid their actions regarding Liz. We can address it later, but we have more important things to deal with now.”

Max shook his head, looking between him and his siblings. “You don’t get it. You…” He glared at Michael. “You’re a _hypocrite_. What if it had been Alex we sent away that summer?”

Michael let go of Isobel, blinking rapidly. “How’d you –”

“No one sent me away that summer,” Alex snapped. “Sit down. We’re not dragging up ancient history while current events are still underway.” His face felt hot, but he waited until Max lowered himself mutinously into his chair again before looking down at his notes. “2021,” he said ruthlessly. “August seventeenth. Michael leaves Roswell for a job in Texas. Wednesday eighteenth, Project Shepherd removes the pods from the cave and takes them to Penvale. Thursday nineteenth, Project Shepherd illegally abducts Max, Isobel, and Noah. There’s a brief power outage in parts of town – was that you?” he asked Max, who took a deep breath, then nodded at the table.

“There were three guys. They got me with some sort of tranquiliser, but I got my hands on one of them. I almost killed him.”

“Okay. Do you remember what happened at all?” Alex asked Isobel, who shook her head.

“They got me and Noah in bed. I don’t remember it clearly, I don’t know how many of them there were.”

Alex nodded and wrote that down. “Okay. You were both moved to Penvale that night. Do you remember anything?”

“You read the files on the laptop,” Michael realised. “You know what those assholes did.”

“I do.” Alex looked between them. “I can skip it and you can read the files yourselves, or I can give you a summary.”

“We already know what happened to us.” Isobel pulled her knees up onto her chair, looking for all the world like a teenager. “Go ahead.”

Alex waited for Max’s terse nod, then went on. “They’d done a lot of experiments on aliens before, and a lot of experiments regarding the effect you guys have on what we think of as natural haunt phenomena. The physical debris from your ship, for example.” He pulled the pendant he was wearing out from under his shirt for a second for Max and Isobel to see. “A lot of it naturally disrupts haunt activity. When it comes to the survivors though, you two reacted in a completely different way to any of the previous victims.”

That got their attention. Max and Isobel exchanged a look loaded with meaning; Liz-related drama apparently set aside for now. Michael was the one to ask, “Different how?”

“Previous experiments showed that the Project Shepherd scientists could force reactions in some cases, but it was very basic. Like, poking you with a stick to make you float something. It took them decades to figure out that something in your biology means you can disperse ghosts with your powers and your touch. And all of your people can do this, I think, based on what I was reading last night. Not all of you have these extra abilities that you have – telekinesis and electricity manipulation and stuff like that – but everyone could destroy haunts. And in the process of this series of experiments, both humans and aliens figured out that you guys can manipulate and amplify them too.”

“I told you, we’ve never done that,” Michael said, like Alex had accused them of something.

“I know,” he reassured him. “It’s not a bad thing though, y’know? It’s just something you can do. Anyway, they’d already put the pods in that chamber and hooked them up to that machine, which it turns out reads electromagnetic output and a few other things, and then they brought you two and Noah in. Took blood and a bunch of other things, and wasted no time taking you down to the pods to test a few things there too.

“And that’s when things got screwy. You remember those cabinets I couldn’t look at?” he asked Michael, who nodded. Max and Isobel looked confused though, so Alex explained. “While you were in their operating room, lab, whatever it was, did you notice a load of glass cabinets in the wall? Michael couldn’t see anything in them either, but I could. Turns out that if you inject an alien with a certain cocktail of drugs and stick them in a room with a haunted object, they destroy the haunt by sheer proximity, no forced action required. When they tried doing that with you guys, in the pod chamber, you didn’t destroy the energy of the haunt – you mutated it.”

“Mutated it?” Michael repeated, disbelief dripping from every word. “Seriously?”

“I’m paraphrasing, but it’s not like these guys knew what the hell they were doing either,” Alex said, gesturing at his notebook. “And they were running this with less than half the resources they wanted, so things were bound to get messy.”

“But that’s not how it works!” Michael protested, both hands grasping the air. “It’s a distortion, it’s not – look, you can’t _mutate_ one type of energy into another, that’s not possible.”

“Neither’s telekinesis,” Alex shrugged. “Neither’s mindwalking, or healing a fatal gunshot wound.”

“Just go with it,” Max muttered. “And know that this is how I felt every time you tried to tutor me through our science classes.”

Michael made a disgusted sound, but waved a hand for Alex to continue.

“No one else had ever had this reaction before,” Alex said. “I don’t know whether it was the presence of the pods, or whether you guys are somehow different to the other aliens Project Shepherd captured, but it seriously messed with the supernatural energy around you, and in Roswell.”

“Why in Roswell?” Isobel asked, frowning. “That isn’t even where the original crash site is, or where the other aliens were being held.”

“I think it’s because you all live here.” Alex rubbed his thumb against the edges of the pages. “I have theories, none of them provable. Point is, I’m pretty sure the amplified haunt activity here can be dialled back to its normal levels if we remove the pods from their current location, and we figure out how to dispose of the waste product of the experiment, which is what was in those cabinets.”

“Okay, also.” Michael leaned forward, one elbow on the table, pointing a finger at Alex. “What the hell does that mean? How come you could see it and I couldn’t? And how come it hurt you?”

“I think because Max and Isobel accidentally weaponised it.” Alex sighed and tapped his pen against the table. “They’d done experiments before where they forced their ‘subjects’ to amplify haunts while in the presence of ship debris that naturally disrupts it, as a test of strength. Since your pods had the same disruptive effect on the haunted objects they brought into contact with them and they didn’t have any other ship debris on hand, they ran the test with what they had. They were using a haunted bracelet as the test object, and whatever happened massively amplified the haunt and almost killed everyone in the chamber.”

“And the cabinets?” Michael pressed. “Are you telling me they figured out a way to contain this ‘mutated energy’? Which I still think is complete bullshit, by the way.”

“You’re free to read their reports,” Alex said dryly. “The cabinets are special. They contain trace elements from debris they stole from your ship. Broken down and repurposed as containment units. Don’t ask me how they split this energy up and put it in neat boxes,” he added warningly before Michael could open his mouth again. “I don’t know, and they’re irritatingly vague about it in the reports. There’s a process for it written down somewhere, but they just call it ‘containment procedure L-52’. 

“And speaking of containment.” He looked at Michael. “They have another process called P-18, which uses a synthesised chemical based on the pollen of a very rare flower. You’ll never guess what it looks like.”

Michael’s eyes widened. “The flower in Maria’s pendant?”

Alex quirked his eyebrows in a silent yes. “They don’t wear them like she does though; they ingest it, like vitamin pills. It protects them from people with abilities like Isobel’s.” He looked at her. “And has the side-effect of protecting them from haunts more effectively than any other material or process on the planet. It dulls their sensitivity, but it’s why my dad wasn’t being haunted the same way Kyle and I were.”

“But why was Mimi?” Michael frowned. “I thought – we thought it was like a curse, because your families were directly involved.” A slightly horrified look passed over his face, and as he glanced at Max, Alex realised he hadn’t told Max and Isobel that the DeLucas knew the truth.

“Back into unprovable theory territory,” Alex said, pulling the focus back to himself. “But if you were a captive and you knew there were people out there who knew about your suffering and weren’t doing anything to help, wouldn’t you want them to suffer too?” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, that’s when the haunt activity in town exploded. 

“Friday twentieth, Michael gets back to town and realises you two and Noah are missing. Tuesday twenty-fourth, he drives to Las Cruces to recruit me. He tells me you three are aliens and proves it to the point where I really can’t deny the evidence. Wednesday twenty-fifth, we drive back to Roswell. Between then and now, Maria and Mimi DeLuca, and Kyle Valenti get involved.”

Michael was looking at Max like he was worried he was going to lash out, and Max was frowning, looking between him and Alex. “Involved how?”

“We’ll get to it,” Alex said. “Kyle first – he’s been seriously haunted since you two were abducted. Michael and I went out to set some wards down on his dad’s old hunting cabin, where he’s been staying, and we found a piece of your spaceship hidden in the walls of a bunker that Kyle didn’t even know was there. It was a whole thing.” He took a breath and barrelled on. “Kyle doesn’t know about aliens, but his father was involved with Project Shepherd in some capacity. Mimi DeLuca did – does – know about aliens.”

Isobel dropped her head into her hands, and Max pushed himself back from the table again, but didn’t stand up. Michael ducked his head to avoid looking at him, and Alex went on.

“Maria’s got very good natural sensitivity, so she was helping me with the human perspective on this case. In the course of that, Michael and I both ended up visiting Mimi, who was suffering from some sort of dementia-like condition which I think was a different manifestation of the way Kyle and I were being shadowed, or maybe a more advanced stage of it. Michael basically cured her, so I’m afraid Maria’s in the know.”

“Fuck,” Isobel whispered into her hands. 

“Another issue to deal with later,” Alex said. “Mimi’s the one who gave us the location of my dad’s local bunker, which led us to Penvale, so technically you have her to thank for how fast we found you.” 

“We were in that place for eight days,” Max growled.

Alex shook his head in lieu of a shrug. “It could have been longer. And now we’re up to speed on that, I want to know what happened to Noah. The records say he seemed to suffer a fatal stroke on the afternoon of the twentieth.” He looked at Isobel, who lifted her head and nodded.

“I had to. When we woke up, he was in my head. He tried to explain it, everything he’d done. He said we were refugees, and we’d been fleeing a civil war. He said we were special.” She gestured to herself, Max, and Michael. “But he didn’t say why. He was going to tell them about Michael.” Next to her, Michael ducked his head again to push a hand through his hair. “I couldn’t let him do that.”

“Why was he going to do that?” Alex asked. “I never got the impression from these reports that they actually tried engaging with you as people.”

“They didn’t,” Max grunted. “They treated us like animals. Didn’t even look at us, didn’t speak to us, completely ignored us unless they were dragging us from the cells to the lab. And even then they wore gloves, like they thought we had some sort of disease.”

“I think Noah thought he could bargain with them,” Isobel said quietly. “You know, negotiate for stuff. I told him, they’d never release us, not when they’d caught us, but he was freaking out. He kept saying he couldn’t be imprisoned again.”

“Leftover trauma from his time awake in his broken pod, maybe.” Alex wrote it down quickly, flicking between his new page and the timeline. “Was this when he told you about Rosa too?”

“Yeah. And he said if we could get our hands on them, we could kill them and get stronger. He said he’d teach me, and Max, and he knew how to do it because he’d killed people to stay strong, because his pod had weakened him. It was making me kill Rosa that gave him the energy to escape, back in 2008.” She shrank into herself, lip curled in something like disgust. “He called us a family. He wanted us to all go home as a family, that’s how he put it. But he was totally willing to throw Michael under the bus. We must’ve argued with each other for hours, going back and forth between our minds. And he couldn’t lie, when I was in his.” Her eyes flashed to Alex’s. “You know what it’s like now. It’s not a compulsion like it is for humans, but we can’t lie. So I knew he would do it, he’d tell them about Michael. I wasn’t going to let him do that.”

“He escaped his pod in 2008?” Alex turned over a new page, eyebrow raised. “Did he tell you what he did next?”

“Remade himself.” Isobel cleared her throat and straightened up a little, though she was still holding her knees against her chest. “He already knew how this world worked from hijacking me, I guess. I don’t know where he went. I didn’t meet him till I was 23 – in 2014, I think.”

“I did some digging while we were looking for you,” Alex told her. “His identity was fake and so were his qualifications. But I guess it’s easy to fake your way through life if you can read minds.”

“He had other powers too.” Isobel glanced at Michael. “He could move things like you can. And he could – he called it _inhabiting_ me, when he was.” She swallowed. “When he was bodysnatching me, or whatever. And the way he killed people, that was like what Max can do.”

“Some of the aliens who did have abilities like yours displayed multiple powers,” Alex told her. “But it didn’t last. Project Shepherd reported that everyone’s powers waned significantly over the first few years of captivity, which makes sense.”

“Does it?” Max frowned at him.

“Long-term imprisonment takes a huge toll on the body and on the mind. I think it makes sense that it would have an effect on your powers as well. More unprovable theories.” He shrugged apologetically and looked at Isobel again. “Did he tell you anything else?”

She shook her head slowly. “He said he loved Rosa. Like, was _in_ love with her.” Out of her sight, Michael made a face. “He said if we could get out, if we could work together and escape, we could go back to the way things were.” She swallowed and shook her head again, harder. “I couldn’t let him tell them about Michael.”

“So you killed him.” Alex was careful to keep all judgement out of his voice. If everything she said was true, it wasn’t like he could fault her on it anyway. “How? You were in separate cells, right?”

“Max helped.” She looked over at him. “I pulled him into Noah’s head and he held him still while I killed him.” She frowned at the table, then at Alex. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

“You could show us,” Michael suggested. “Play the memory game?”

“The memory game?” Alex looked between them all.

Max was the one to explain. “When we were kids, we figured out that Isobel could pull memories. If she’s in your mind, she can ask you to show her something, and your brain sorta reconstructs the memory like you’re in it, or like you’re watching it. I can do it a little bit too, through a handprint, but it’s way less precise.”

Another terrifying aspect to Isobel’s abilities. Fantastic. Alex nodded slowly and tried not to frown too much. “Do you want to show us?”

“Not really.” Isobel sighed and picked at the sleeve of her sweater. “Max, you were there, you’re good at describing stuff.”

He nodded and put his head on one side, clearly thinking. Alex waited, and eventually, Max spoke. “From my perspective, Isobel came into my mind first. She told me everything, and we agreed that we had to protect Michael, at any cost. We knew he’d only be free as long as the people holding us thought they’d captured all three aliens they were looking for. Noah couldn’t be allowed to jeopardise that. So Isobel took my hand and we went into Noah’s mind together.

“He knew what was about to happen. Our powers don’t work in our minds – I wouldn’t be able to heal someone, and Michael wouldn’t be able to use his telekinesis – but the mindscape is fluid. It was Noah’s mind, so he was dressed in clothes he’d imagined for himself. It still looked like we were in his cell, all three of us, and when he tried to run Isobel did something that meant he couldn’t.”

“My powers still work,” she said quietly. “Mine always work.”

Max nodded. “So the walls didn’t vanish. He tried to attack her, but I stopped him and got him on his knees, hands behind his back. Standard arrest, except I had to hold onto him because I didn’t have any handcuffs. Isobel grabbed his head and he started screaming. You know the way it looks when Isobel’s in your head, with the lights around you? Those lights went bright for a second, then started to go dim. Noah started bleeding from his nose and ears, and Isobel pushed me out of his mind before it could go dark.”

“I didn’t want him trapped there, just in case.” Isobel looked down at her hands. “I was pretty sure I could get out in time, but I wanted to get Max out before the end, in case he couldn’t get back to himself on his own. When the lights went out…I snapped back into my body.”

Alex could picture it all, exactly as Max had described. “When you held his head,” he said carefully. “What were you doing?”

“Crushing his brain. I just…imagined it. I’m the one with the power in there.”

Deeply disturbing though it was to know that Isobel could apparently kill people without even needing to be anywhere near them, Alex just nodded. “Alright. Yesterday, the twenty-ninth, Michael and I drove to Penvale and got you out. Williams is still there, as is my dad’s corpse. Next step is for us to recover your pods and move them to a safe location. Any ideas?”

“There are other caves,” Michael offered. “I know it’s not great, but it’s probably the best we can do at short notice.”

“Do you have any in mind?” Alex asked.

“Sure. I’ve explored the area around the Foster Ranch a lot, I know where there are some good places. Most of ‘em get flooded when the rains get heavy though, so we’d have to move them again pretty quick.”

“Could you drive to a suitable cave?” Michael nodded, and Alex breathed out. “Alright. How fast can we hire a van in this town?”

“I know a guy.” Michael got his phone out and held it up. “I can borrow a van for a day, owner owes me a favour.”

“Call them.” Alex closed the notebook and capped his pen. “I’ll need you to help me move the pods – telekinesis will come in handy for that. But you two don’t have to come too.” He looked at Max and Isobel. “You’ve been through a lot, you can stay here and rest.”

“No way.” Isobel shook her head so hard her hair flew out. “I’m not letting Michael out of my sight for at least a week.”

“We’ll take Michael’s truck, you two can take this van,” Max said, having some sort of conversation with Isobel with only their eyes. “Isobel can keep an eye on Michael with her mind, and make sure there’s no one unexpected waiting at Penvale when we get there.”

Alex nodded. “That would be helpful.” He’d just have to trust that they wouldn’t leave him out there to rot once they’d gotten their pods back. But at this point, that line of thinking sounded more like unfounded paranoia than rational suspicion. And his gut reaction of trepidation at the prospect of spending four plus hours alone in a van with Michael Guerin was definitely not something to pay any attention to.

They were on the road in less than an hour, Michael driving the van, Alex sitting across the bench from him with his laptop, pretending he wasn’t using it as a shield. A completely useless pretence, when Michael cleared his throat as they passed the city limits and said, “So. Do you believe us about what happened to Rosa?”

Alex closed his laptop. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Michael cut a look across at him, audibly relieved. “No doubts at all?”

“I have doubts about everything.” Alex leaned back in his seat and sighed. “But her story fits, and if she’s lying, it’s a hell of a con to pull. And if it is a lie, there’s nothing I can really do about it, is there? All three of you have committed crimes of varying levels of severity in the eyes of the law, but your actions make sense considering your points of view at the time.”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “Okay, translate that for the people in the cheap seats?”

Alex scowled at him. “Don’t play dumb, Mr I-reconstructed-an-alien-spaceship-in-my-spare-time.”

“It’ll never be doctor,” Michael said dryly. “Though I guess I could pull a Noah and just fake a PhD.”

“Why, when you could get it honestly?”

“Shit, Alex, maybe because I’ve got less than forty dollars in my bank account?”

“You should check out the military,” Alex said. “Almost everyone I knew was in it for the college or the healthcare.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Yeah, I’m joking.” Alex looked down at his lap. “I guess I’m not very funny.”

They were both quiet. As always, Michael was the one to break the silence. “You left something off your timeline.”

Alex frowned at him. “What?” He hadn’t, he was sure of it.

Michael lifted his left hand and waggled it. “Night of Rosa’s death. Michael corners Alex at the UFO Emporium, Alex invites him back to his place for –”

“I didn’t, it’s not like I forgot about it.” Alex blinked quickly. “You said you hadn’t told Max and Isobel about it, and I didn’t want to talk about it without asking you first. And it wasn’t, it’s not relevant to the case.”

“The case.” Michael raised an eyebrow and glanced at him quickly, somehow managing to convey oceans of scepticism in that one look. “Is that all this is to you? Just another case?”

“You know it isn’t.” Alex was not talking about this, not without an escape route. He wouldn’t survive. “Did you want me to tell them?”

“I don’t know.” The fingers of Michael’s good hand flexed on the steering wheel. “Isobel wanted all cards on the table. Guess I’m wondering whether I should lay out all of mine. You’ve seen them all now – you know more about me than anyone else on this whole planet.”

Did he have any idea what it did to Alex to hear that? “It’s up to you,” he managed. “They’re your secrets. It’s your choice.”

“What would you do? If you were me?”

Alex took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly a sharer. You.” He swallowed. “You probably know more about me than anyone now.”

Michael’s head jerked as he looked at him for a full second. Alex was so glad he had to look away after that to keep his eyes on the road. “You’re a closed book to me, man,” Michael said, low. “You’ve spent less than a week with me doing this, you’re telling me this is you being _open?_”

“A therapist once told me that it’s a power thing.”

“Come again?”

“Information is power, right? So the less people know about me, the less power they have over me. That was her gist, I think. Apparently I was a really bad patient – refused to open up.”

“No way.” Michael’s sarcasm was so exaggerated that Alex couldn’t help smiling.

“Try to contain your shock.”

Michael snorted. “Was this the person you saw after your injury?”

“Yeah. And they make you do psych evaluations to qualify as a shade too.”

“Oh shit. Well, there goes my last hope of going straight.”

“Like there’s anything straight about you.” Alex’s lips twitched when Michael laughed. “Besides, it’s not like you’d be the first to fake your way through it. The stereotype of shades with traumatic backgrounds is there for a reason.”

“Did you fake your way through it?”

“Sort of. Everyone does a bit, I think.” Alex drummed his fingers against the lid of his laptop. “It’s not like I was going to tell a bunch of strangers about stuff like that.”

“Like your nightmares?”

Alex said nothing. The excuse that they’d been purely because of the haunt was on his lips, but he didn’t want to lie outright. 

“Alright.” Michael cleared his throat. “What’re your unprovable theories then?”

Alex loved him so much his chest hurt. He flexed his residual limb in its socket and breathed out. “Which one do you want first?”

“Whichever one is the least provable.”

Alex snorted. “They’re all impossible to prove. But okay, I have a theory about what exactly happened when that first experiment in the pod chamber went wrong.”

“Hit me.”

“Okay. So Noah wasn’t wrong about the three of you being different from the other survivors of the crash, in the sense that you three are the only ones without any memory of life before you landed, and you’ve had no one to connect you to your past at all.”

“Don’t rub it in,” Michael muttered, probably trying to sound wry. It just came off as sad.

“My point is,” Alex tried to be gentler, “your connections on this planet are really, really localised to Roswell, as your hometown. I’ve got a side-theory that it was Isobel’s powers that directed the haunt activity in Roswell to explode in precisely the way it did, but I’ll get into that in a second. For Isobel and Max, who haven’t been searching for other fragments of their heritage the way you have been, the pods are their only connection to that past, right?”

“They’re the only proof we ever had.” Michael glanced at him quickly. “We might’ve thought we were mutants or government experiments or something if it weren’t for the pods.”

“Exactly. Your whole identity as aliens is bound to them.” Alex remembered the way they’d glowed in the dark chamber, beauty amid the ugliness of the concrete and machinery of Project Shepherd. “Also, I can’t be absolutely sure until I’ve gone through everything we’ve stolen, data-wise, but I’m betting that Project Shepherd had never recovered any undamaged pods before yours. That they kept you in stasis, undamaged, for fifty years means they’re incredibly powerful in a way we don’t understand. 

“So you’ve got this combination.” He gestured with his hands. “Hugely powerful pods, aliens with a really strong connection to a specific location, and a haunted object. Put them all in a chamber that I bet has the alien equivalent of lead in the walls, and the aliens react so strongly to that combination that all the haunting activity in their hometown goes completely haywire in a way only alien influence can produce, and the aliens themselves are collectively smudged from the town’s memory.”

“Like a curse,” Michael said slowly, almost thoughtful.

“Exactly like a curse.” Alex bit back a smile. “Exactly. The targeted nature of it spread backwards too – through bloodlines and families.”

“The Valentis.” Michael looked at him quickly, catching on. “And you.”

“Yeah.” After a second, Alex went on. “I’ve been thinking about racial memory, in relation to all this. The three of you have been cut off from your original culture and had to assimilate on Earth, with the threat of death and dissection hanging over your heads if you didn’t. And you had the bad luck to get stuck in Roswell, which has reminders of that literally everywhere.”

“I’m glad we stayed here.” Michael tilted his head, and Alex saw him look up at the sky, arching blue and cloud-swirled overhead. “I always figured that if anyone was ever coming back, this is where they’d start looking. I never wanted to move too far away, just in case.”

“You never moved away at all.”

“Yeah.” Michael sighed. “Furthest I considered was Albuquerque, for college.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Were you gonna save up?”

“Didn’t need to. I had a full ride, catered accommodation and everything, all paid for. I had it all figured out.”

Alex realised he was staring, and made himself face forward again. “What happened?”

“Rosa.” Michael said. “I told you, Max and I didn’t let Isobel out of our sight for years after that. I couldn’t go to college.”

Alex’s view of the road blurred. He thought of all those books in Michael’s trailer, all the work he’d done in his bunker, hidden underground, kept secret even from his family. The unfairness of it was breathtaking. “Where were you gonna go?” he heard himself ask.

“UNM.”

Alex had dreamed of going there too. He’d never seriously expected to make it, not without his dad’s support, which he’d known would never be given, but he’d thought about it. He’d checked out colleges in a wistful sort of way. UNM, EMU, maybe community college. He’d wanted to make music. He remembered the website, and the adobe building splashed across the front of it that must have been their administration centre or a library or something similar.

Michael would have been an incredible student. He would have blown them all away.

“You’re amazing, you know,” he said.

“For turning down a once-in-a-lifetime scholarship?” Michael laughed, short and humourless. “Thanks.”

“No. For doing everything you have without any help. I don’t know much about mechanics, but I bet reverse-engineering your ship wasn’t exactly an overnight job.”

“I’ve been working on it since I was about twelve.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything for that long.”

“I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been doing anything else. I don’t work on it every day or anything, it’s kind of in fits and starts.” Michael cleared his throat. “You think we’ve got a racial memory?”

“Maybe. Who knows? The idea of it is contested enough in humans, but you’re a whole other species.”

“Wonder if my organs glow,” Michael muttered.

“Let’s not find out.”

“Why not? The DeLucas know, why not bring in Dr Valenti and get him to give me an x-ray on the sly?”

“I genuinely can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”

“Mostly joking.” Michael cracked his neck. “It’s messed up, how I keep thinking about Noah.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I know he turned out to be this…this monster, who…I mean, let’s be real, if he’s been in Isobel’s head since she was fourteen, that makes their entire relationship a lie. Everything he’s ever done to her is a violation. He’s been raping my sister for years and we had no idea. Like, if that’s screwing me up, how bad is it for Isobel? You can’t have consent when mind control is involved.” He sighed loudly. “So it’s not exactly ambiguous, right? He was a monster. He was about as evil as a person can be.”

“But you liked him,” Alex said slowly, understanding. 

“I knew it wasn’t Isobel, that night Rosa died.” Michael gripped the steering wheel tightly, broken fingers extended into the air. “I saw it in her eyes. One of the reasons I decided to do shadow work in the first place was to see if I could find a haunt that could possess me, just to prove that it could happen. I’ve done more possession cases than any other shade I know, and it turns out it was all for nothing, because the possessor was under my nose the whole time, and I thought he was great.” Michael’s curls bounced as he shook his head. “I thought he was a great guy, I thought he was perfect for Isobel. He was exactly what she…fuck, I always told her she deserved him. Fuck.” 

Alex watched as Michael passed a hand over his face, pale under his stubble. “People like Noah are expert liars,” he said. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.”

“I should’ve. Max should’ve. He’s psychically linked to her, why couldn’t he tell?”

“If Isobel herself couldn’t tell, you can’t expect Max to have any better insight,” Alex said firmly. “And you can’t turn on each other and start blaming yourselves for this. Blame Noah.”

“I’m gonna miss him.” Michael glanced at him quickly. “Isn’t that messed up? He was such a good guy. He never treated me any different from Max, ever.”

Alex frowned. “Why would he?”

“All Isobel’s boyfriends before that, they treated Max like the real brother and me as, like, I don’t know. A fake. Couple of them thought Isobel and I were hooking up.” He pulled a face. “Noah never thought that. I guess he wouldn’t, since he knew Isobel’s mind. But he never…y’know, he treated me like I really was her brother. Like family.”

“It’s okay to miss the version of Noah you knew,” Alex said. “I mean, probably not in front of Isobel.”

“Or Max. Max never liked him as much as I did. Shit, maybe he could tell something was wrong, on some level.” Michael sighed again. 

“You can keep talking to me,” Alex offered. “I don’t mind. I never knew him at all.”

“Yeah.” Michael chewed his lip. “Tell me another unprovable theory. You were saying something about Isobel, before.”

“Oh, yeah. The way the haunts manifested in Roswell, specifically – the way you’ve talked about her, it sounds like she never had any intention of moving away. And, I kind of remembered Isobel in high school. I know she’s probably changed since then, but I kept thinking…you know, girls have to be so much more image-conscious than boys anyway, and she had the added disadvantage of not even being human. Like, at least you and Max had each other to talk to. She didn’t have any other girls at all.”

“Kind of the opposite of you.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t remember you hanging out with anyone except Liz and Maria at school. And I know you weren’t close with your brothers, or your dad.”

“Wildly different situation,” Alex said dryly. He could see what Michael was trying to do, trying to get him to talk about himself. “But sure. I just thought, maybe that’s where the effect of the town-wide influence came from, the way everyone sort of forgot to notice their absence. That’s Isobel’s power, right? Influence?”

“Yeah. She can’t control people, she can just give them a push. Like…like you said yesterday. About Liz. She was leaving anyway, Isobel just made her go faster.”

“And told her never to come back.”

“Yeah. But Liz wouldn’t’ve stayed away if she didn’t want to, on some level. We practiced, a little bit, when we were kids. She can make you do something you’re thinking about, like, something you kinda want to do anyway, but she wouldn’t be able to make you jump off a cliff or something.”

“Unless you wanted to.” Michael gave him a sharp look, and Alex rolled his eyes. “Calm down, Guerin, I’m just saying. Liz _is_ finding out, by the way.”

Michael shook his head. “She can’t. It’s bad enough you and the DeLucas knowing, it’s way too dangerous.”

“If it had been Isobel,” Alex said tightly. “Wouldn’t you want to know the truth?” Michael’s silence was damning. “Yeah. Arturo is going to need to know too, you know. And I’m pretty sure Max is going to be with me on this one.”

“She doesn’t even live here anymore,” Michael said desperately, and Alex clenched his fists.

“And whose fault is that? Jesus, Guerin, you sent her out of town before her own sister’s funeral!”

“Max was gonna tell her! We didn’t have a choice!”

“Don’t pull that,” Alex snapped. “You absolutely had a choice, and you know it. Just because your choices were all bad, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.”

“What the hell would you have done?”

“Talked to Max about it, probably. Reasoned with him –”

“Oh, good luck with that.” Michael laughed harshly. “Mighty Max is the leader, Alex. We follow him, not the other way around. He wouldn’t’ve listened to us. You think we didn’t wanna talk to him? We knew we couldn’t, or he’d run straight to Liz.”

“He might’ve waited, if you’d talked to him.”

“Nah. You don’t know him like we do. And besides, what do you think Liz would’ve done, if she thought I’d killed her sister and two other girls? Don’t forget, we weren’t about to let Isobel take the blame for that.”

That was a good point. Alex knew how angry Liz could get, at least in high school. And there was no way she would have been able to keep a secret like that from Maria. It was an odd kind of hurt to realise that he would have been the only one kept out of the loop, if they’d both found out in high school. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Okay. I get it.”

Michael blinked, and looked over at him for a second. “Oh.”

“I’m not fighting with you for the sake of fighting,” Alex said. “I get it. You were doing the best you could with a terrible situation. It was a shit time for all of you.”

Michael glanced at him again. “You too.”

Alex fought the urge to groan. “Well at least I didn’t have to worry about an arrest leading to permanent imprisonment.” That was an angle they could play when they approached Liz and Arturo, he decided. He knew Arturo was undocumented – he and Liz would understand better than most what the risk of coming to the attention of the authorities would mean for Michael, Max, and Isobel. It was coldly calculating, but it was necessary.

“Neat avoidance,” Michael said dryly.

“Thanks, I’ve practiced.” Alex cleared his throat. “We should talk about your options going forward.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll help shut down Project Shepherd properly, if I can, but Max and Isobel’s identities might have already been compromised. The government clearly knows aliens are real, even if it deemed the threat non-existent enough to shut down the project tasked with dealing with it. We need to figure out how likely it is that you guys have already been exposed.”

“You said something about leaving the country, before.” Michael swallowed. “That’s what you mean, right? Going on the run.”

“Yeah. Ideally somewhere the US can’t get to you.”

“Like where? The Vatican? China?”

“I would strongly recommend against China.” And most of the countries that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the US, honestly. “I can create new identities for you, if it comes to it. Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world?”

Michael hummed. “You know, I’ve never even crossed the Mississippi? Furthest north I’ve been is Kansas. I’ve never seen the ocean.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.” Michael shook his head slowly. “You try not to think about things that are impossible, right? Max was gonna go to Europe after high school. Had money saved, and his parents were gonna give him a loan or something to cover the rest. I couldn’t even imagine it. Italy seems about as far away as Mars, to me.”

“I could get you passports,” Alex said, reckless. “You could go to Italy, see for yourself. It’s nothing like Mars.” Nothing like the dangerous black of space where Michael was determined to fling himself. There was a horrible, selfish part of him that wanted them to have to go on the run. It would be so much harder for Michael to construct a spaceship and jet off into space if he was on the move.

“You’ve been to Mars?” Michael asked dryly.

“I’ve been to Italy.” Alex smiled at Michael’s surprised look. “On leave, once. Only for two days, but it was good. Worth seeing, before you write this planet off.” 

“Earth isn’t all bad.” Michael glanced at him. “It has perks.”

“Breathable air?” Alex suggested. “Food? Water?”

“Tequila,” Michael said thoughtfully. “Weed. Sex.”

Alex snorted. “Talk about getting your priorities straight.”

“Thought there was nothing straight about me?” 

“As shown by your skewed priorities.”

“I don’t know.” Michael looked over at him, eyelids heavy. “My priorities aren’t all bad.”

Sex. He was talking about the sex. Alex refused to look away, even as heat washed over his skin. “Thinking you might stick around on Earth for a while then?”

“Got no choice.” Michael looked forward again, and Alex could breathe. “Told you before, there’s a lot in space travel needs to be considered before I can actually blast off. And, y’know. There might be some things worth sticking around for.”

Alex tried not to let himself think Michael was talking about anything but sex. “I’m a fan of Earth’s snack options, it has to be said.”

“Disneyland.” Michael looked at him, smiling slightly. “I’ve always wanted to go to Disneyland.”

Alex laughed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. You remember in eighth grade when Michelle Rainer went to Disneyland over spring break and came back with candy for everyone? It sounded like fun. You ever been to Disneyland?”

“Never.”

“Take me to Disneyland.”

“Okay.” Alex smiled and looked out at the blue, blue sky. “I’ll take you to Disneyland. Where next?”

“I don’t know, you pick. Where’s the coolest place you’ve ever been?”

Alex hummed. “Greece, maybe.”

“Awesome. Take me to Greece. What’s it like?”

“Hot.”

“So’s New Mexico.”

“It’s a different kind of hot. And where I was, the sea was beautiful. I’d never seen the ocean before I enlisted, y’know.”

“You’ve been swimming in it?”

“Yeah. It’s way saltier than you’d expect.”

Michael snorted. “The sea is salty? Wow, you should write guidebooks.”

“Shut up.” Alex rolled his eyes, grinning. “I’m just saying, it’s really salty. Like, if you get it in your mouth, you have to spit and spit to get the taste out.”

“Does it sting your eyes? People complain about that, right?”

“A little. And it’s kinda sticky when you get out and dry off, but not in a bad way. One of the best days I ever had in Greece was just spending the whole day on the beach, going in and out of the sea and doing absolutely nothing. Like a real holiday.” He knew what Michael was doing, getting him to talk about himself in innocuous bits and pieces, but he didn’t mind. Useless information like this he didn’t mind parting with, so much. Or at least, he didn’t mind parting with it for Michael.

They kept it up all the way there, keeping the mood between them miraculously light. It only faded when they left the highway, turning onto the dirt track that would lead them to Penvale.

“Max and Isobel still behind us?” Alex asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

They did the rest of the drive in silence. At the turning to Penvale itself, Michael made a quiet sound. “Iz says Williams is the only one there.”

“She’s sure?”

“Positive.”

Alex nodded. He had Michael’s revolver just in case, though he knew that in this scenario, he was probably the weakest hitter of the group. Considering he was a decorated veteran with three tours under his belt and his companions were civilians, it was an odd thing to know.

They didn’t need to worry. In a way, it was easy. Max took point this time, refusing point-blank to let Alex ahead of him. “Getting shot once is plenty,” he said, and Alex let it go, since Max was at least familiar with the proper way to enter a potentially dangerous building. But there was nothing to worry about. Williams shouted when he heard them coming down the stairs, and Alex gestured for the aliens to keep going to the pod chamber.

“I’ll be there in a second.” He went to the kitchen room to get a bottle of water, and smiled when he pulled the hatch open to pass it through to Williams. “Sucks being stuck in a cell, huh?”

“You!” Williams backed away, eyes wide. He was looking a little worse for wear for having slept the night on a metal bench, but Alex couldn’t say he cared. “What’re you…are you just gonna keep me here?”

“It’d be fair, don’t you think? Considering that’s what you were doing to my friends.” Alex waggled the bottle, and when Williams didn’t approach, he dropped it onto the floor through the hatch. “Think of it this way – at least I’m not strapping you to a table and shooting you up with drugs, right? It could be worse.”

“You can’t keep me here forever.” Williams stood up straighter. “There are more of us than you think.”

“Yeah? What makes you think I haven’t got them locked up too?” Alex smiled pleasantly. “Turnabout’s fair play, right? Did you really get into this to experiment on innocent people?”

“I’ve never experimented on anyone.”

“Right, I forgot, your background’s in ammunition. Gotta say, I’m curious about how you got into this.” Alex gestured at their surroundings. “Did Manes recruit you specifically? Was he bribing you? Threatening you?” There – a flicker of fear. “It’s his MO, right? Guy could manipulate his way into pretty much any room he wants, but there’s only so far you can get with that when your funding’s been cut. You know this whole operation is illegal, right?”

“It’s…no it’s not.” Williams stared at him, starting to go pale. “It’s not, I’ve seen the paperwork. We report to Chief Master Sergeant Manes, and he reports to Major Thompson.”

“He doesn’t though.” Alex shook his head. “He lied about that. The funding for Project Shepherd was cut in twenty-_ten_. How long have you been part of it?”

“I want a lawyer,” Williams whispered, and Alex laughed.

“Airman, I want a million dollars, a steak sandwich, and the ability to reverse time. Literally all of those are more likely than you getting a lawyer right now.”

“What do you want from me?”

Alex shrugged. “Nothing, really. I’ve already got everything I could possibly want or need from you. I just figured I’d be a decent person and get you a bottle of water.” He waggled his fingers. “Don’t drink it all at once.” He closed the hatch, and left.

He could have asked Williams how he slept at night, how he lived with himself knowing he’d participated in detaining and torturing innocent people. But he knew Williams would give the same answer Alex had given himself in the past – he was following orders. He was acting on the information he’d been given, and that information was that Max Evans, Isobel Evans-Bracken, and Noah Bracken were domestic terrorists. You didn’t question your superiors: you obeyed them.

Alex wanted to think that he never would have participated in something like Project Shepherd, but the truth was that he probably had. It wasn’t like the US military was known for its mercy or lack of human rights violations.

Michael, Max, and Isobel were in the pod chamber already, circling their pods. They’d turned off the big machine against the wall, and the heat and the background static charge seemed to have eased a bit since yesterday, but the cabinet under the cloth on the workbench still made Alex’s head hurt if he looked at it. “Any ideas?” Michael said as Alex climbed down the metal steps towards them.

“Not really,” Alex admitted. “I couldn’t find anything in the files I looked at last night for the setup they’ve got down here.”

“You’re the mechanic,” Isobel muttered to Michael, pale skin even whiter in the glow of the pods. The lights set into the walls were dim, still warming up.

“I’ve always been really careful with our pods.” Michael frowned. “The distortion isn’t as bad as yesterday though. That’s probably good, right?”

“They were injecting you guys with stuff daily, weren’t they?” Alex looked between Max and Isobel. Max nodded, taking a deep breath.

“They kept us both sedated on and off after Noah died. Maybe they figured we had something to do with it.”

“So maybe you two have metabolised it out of your systems by now,” Alex suggested. “Or you’re at least not as drugged as you were yesterday. That might have something to do with the atmosphere in here being less screwy.”

“Reckon it’s safe for me to touch them?” Michael muttered.

“Can you remove those cables with your mind?” Max asked, before Alex could. “That’d probably be safer.”

“No problem.” Michael narrowed his eyes at the cables, and they detached themselves, all at once, and sank slowly to the ground. “Okay. Now the pods?”

“Wait.” Alex nodded over at the cloth-covered box on the workbench. “We need to deal with that too.”

The three of them looked at it. “Can’t see anything,” Michael said. “Even when the distortion flashes in, that spot’s blank.”

“You said you thought it was a waste product, right?” Isobel asked sharply, going over to the box and pulling off the cloth with no warning. Alex turned away quickly, but not fast enough to avoid a spike of pain going through his right eye, the ache in his head starting to pound. He could hear something too, he realised – a sort of high-pitched whining in his ears.

“Is there something in there?” he asked, making sure to sound calm.

“Yeah, a bracelet. An ugly one.” Isobel made a tsking sort of sound. 

“Guess that’s the haunted object.” Max left Alex’s peripheral vision, he assumed to go and look at the bracelet, and Michael appeared on Alex’s other side.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“As long as I don’t look at it, I’m fine.” Alex frowned. “When you’re dealing with haunted objects, what do you do?”

“Just touch ‘em, usually.” Michael shrugged, at a loss. “I can try that now.”

Alex didn’t like the idea. “We don’t know what will happen.”

“Well we can’t do nothing. Everything’s a bad choice, right?”

Alex gave him a flat look. Michael just shrugged again, unrepentant. 

“I can tell you what will happen,” Isobel called from behind them. Michael whirled around.

“Isobel!”

“What? Nothing. Nothing is happening. It’s just an ugly bracelet, no spooky shit on it at all.”

Alex sighed and looked over his shoulder. Isobel was holding up a small metal bracelet, and the sight of it was like taking a screwdriver to the eye socket. Alex recoiled without meaning to, his hand flying up to his eyes. “Fuck!”

“What the hell did you do that for?” Michael demanded. “Jesus, what is wrong with you people? Put the bracelet down! Don’t look at the mutant ghost! Why the hell am I being the voice of reason in the room?”

“Turns out you’re quite good at it,” Max said dryly. “Let me see that?” Alex assumed he was taking the bracelet from Isobel.

Alex’s eyes were watering heavily, and he ignored Michael when he came round to look at him. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” He wiped his face quickly with the backs of his sleeves. “Has the distortion changed at all? Opening the cabinet, did that do anything?”

“Give it a second, it’s off right now. Which, like, can I just say how weird that is? Electromagnetic distortions to the atmosphere shouldn’t turn on and off like a faulty lightbulb.”

Alex snorted, rubbing his forehead and closing his eyes again. “Yeah. None of my usual approaches seem like they’d work for this.”

“It – oh, it’s back, hang on.” Michael turned around to look at the cabinet. “Huh.”

“What?”

“It’s got distortion in it now. Before, it was like a little blank spot. Maybe opening the box did the trick?”

“But the bracelet is the source?” Isobel said sceptically. “Come on.”

“We could try breaking it?” Max suggested. “That works with some haunted objects, right?”

“Worth a shot,” Michael agreed, but Alex shook his head. 

“Maybe try opening the other cabinets upstairs first and see if that makes any difference.”

“I’ll do it.” Michael touched Alex’s shoulder, turning to face him again. “You gonna stay here?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” He looked over Alex’s shoulder at Max and Isobel, a pained expression on his face. “I really can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but please try not to do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

“Max, you got any tips for him?” Isobel asked. “Should he try to sound sterner?”

“Nah, I think he’s got it nailed.”

“Neither of you are funny.”

Alex couldn’t believe he was having to bite back a smile. His head was throbbing to the pulse of his heart, his eyes were still stinging, they were definitely still in danger, and despite all of that he was amused by Michael’s sibling bickering. It was ridiculous.

Michael left, and Alex kept his back to Max and Isobel as he edged sideways to get a closer look at the pods. The glow hurt his eyes, but they were too interesting for him to consider looking away. They had the same pinkish-orange shimmer in them that parts of Michael’s ship console did, whatever substance was inside them swirling and drifting like smoke or water.

“Do you know which one belongs to each of you?” he asked.

Max walked around the other side of the metal platform the pods were on and nodded. “This one’s mine. The one in front of you is Michael’s.”

“And speaking of Michael.” Isobel walked up behind him and Alex tried hard not to tense up. He didn’t manage it, only easing when she walked into his eyeline. The look she fixed him with put his guard up all over again. “What’s the deal with that?”

“What’s the deal with what?” he asked blandly.

“When I asked yesterday why you were helping us, you said penance, _and Michael._ Actually, you put Michael first. I didn’t even know you two knew each other.”

Alex had had years of practice of lying his way through various situations. He knew his face gave away absolutely nothing – he was more worried about the handprint on his chest, which by now he was sure was fully formed. He shrugged a shoulder, determined to at least try to keep his privacy.

“He likes you,” Max said softly. “He did in high school too. Were you two a thing?”

Alex looked at him. “Why not ask him?”

“Because Michael and I haven’t talked since Rosa died,” Max said easily. “We reminded each other of the worst thing we ever did. We never wanted to talk about it, and that got in the way of everything else.”

“That’s too bad.” Alex held his gaze. “Sounds like something you should bring up with him.”

“We’re bringing it up with you.” Isobel crossed her arms, once again pulling off the trick of projecting intense intimidation while wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. Max moved to stand beside her, and for all their physical differences, Alex didn’t think they’d ever looked more like twins. “Have you two been in contact this whole time?”

“He’s not gonna tell us that,” Max said quietly. “Are you?”

“No.” What had happened to the goofy kid Alex had known in high school? Max was a deputy now, he reminded himself. He’d grown up.

“Tell us this then,” Isobel said sharply. “Are you sticking around? Or are you done now you helped find us?”

“Finding you was only half the job.” Not that he’d known it at the time. “Keeping you hidden is the other half.”

“And when you’ve done that?”

“I guess it depends on your definition of done.” Alex’s eyes flicked between the two of them, careful not to go too fast. Maintaining enough eye contact to appear trustworthy, without looking shifty. “Are you safe if we make sure Project Shepherd is dismantled? What does that look like, in practice? I don’t know about you, but I’m not prepared to go hunting my dad’s former employees like some sort of vigilante, even if they have done reprehensible things.”

“So they get off scot-free?” Isobel raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a decision for after we’ve dealt with the current problem.” Alex indicated the pods and the cabinet behind him. “You need to decide what safe means for you. Say we do dismantle Project Shepherd – do you still feel safe in Roswell? Do you still feel safe using the names you’re using, knowing those are the names you were detained under? Will you keep feeling safe in New Mexico? In the states? On Earth?”

“Are you saying you’d be with us through all that?” Max asked, cutting right to the point with an interested sort of tone to his voice. Like he didn’t quite believe Alex meant it. “What does that mean for you, in practice? If we decide to get out of the country, are you coming with us?”

Alex felt like he was walking a tightrope the width of a thread. “It isn’t up to me.”

“It’s up to Michael.” Max was looking at him like a bug in a jar, and Alex was half a second from snapping when something shivered through his whole body. Like his bones vibrated for a second, from his skull to his foot, or like he’d been suddenly drenched in non-existent water. Max and Isobel staggered, Isobel crying out in surprise. Max looked around, eyes wide. “The haze.”

“What’s happening?” Alex snapped, that odd shivery feeling rolling through him again. Like tapping the side of a bowl to even out the level of the contents. Like leaning back in the ocean and finding the perfect point of balance to allow the body to float.

“He must’ve opened the cabinets,” Isobel gasped, holding onto Max’s arm. She was looking around too, eyes huge in the dim light.

“No shit! What are you two _seeing?_” 

“It’s not coming in and out anymore,” Max said, looking around. “It’s constant. And strong. Really, really strong. Can you look at the bracelet yet?”

Alex didn’t really want to try again, but it wasn’t like there was any other way of finding out. He braced himself and looked over his shoulder at the workbench. The pain stabbed through his whole head, so strong it was like being hit in the face. He stumbled and almost, for a terrifying moment, lost his balance. “I’m fine,” he barked as Max jumped forward to help. “I’m fine.”

“It still hurts you though.” Isobel was looking around with wide eyes, and Alex – something was happening to him, he didn’t know what. Like a huge pressure on his chest. The alien glass was getting hotter, he realised, and he was beginning to struggle to breathe in all the way. 

“It’s getting worse,” he said. “The piece of your ship I’m wearing, it’s reacting to whatever’s going on.” If it got much hotter he was going to have to take if off. His heart was starting to race, and he tried to keep his breathing as even as possible. “I think we should get out, now.”

“We need Michael to help move the pods,” Max said, and they all looked up at the sound of footsteps outside the chamber, and Michael appeared in the doorway a second later.

“Cases are open,” he called, running down the metal staircase two steps at a time. “Something happened – I got knocked off my feet, I don’t understand why. Shit.” He rushed over to Alex, who was leaning forward to try and minimise the contact the alien glass had with his skin. “What’s wrong?”

“Your ship piece is burning up.” Alex swallowed and grabbed it through his shirt, keeping only one edge pressed to his chest. “I don’t think I’m alien enough for this.”

“Take it off,” Michael said at once, wrapping his hand around Alex’s other wrist. “You’re only wearing it because we couldn’t go around holding hands the whole time, I’ll keep you safe.”

His touch did ease the symptoms, whatever they were symptoms of. Alex nodded and pulled on the string around his neck, grimacing as the glass drew a line of fire up to his collarbone as he drew it out of his shirt. Michael helped him lift it off and away, and shoved it in his own pocket. Upstairs, someone started screaming.

“Williams,” Alex realised. He looked at Michael, Max, and Isobel. “What are you guys seeing right now?”

“Strongest haze I’ve ever seen,” Michael said, eyes flicking around the chamber. “It’s staying away from the surface of the pods, but only by an inch. It’s staying away from us by about the same. It’s attracted to you.”

“Iron filings.” Alex swallowed. “Let go of me, let’s see what happens.”

“Are you insane?”

“I’m not asking permission.” Alex stepped backwards and yanked his wrist out of Michael’s grip before he could stop him.

He was restrained on a table and they were torturing him. Terrifying figures in white, only their eyes visible between strips of cloth. Metal in their hands, Alex’s limbs pinned, fire in his veins. They were killing him, he was going to die here, he would never go home, never experience anything again that wasn’t this. The despair was as bad as the pain – it flooded through his mind and erased everything else. There was no hope, nothing but this. Nothing but the table and the pain until he inevitably succumbed to an agonising end.

“Alex!” Michael’s hands were on him – one on the side of his neck, the other on his wrist again. Alex was on the floor, kneeling. He didn’t even know how that had happened. Michael looked terrified. “What the hell!”

“Don’t do that!” Max shouted from behind him. “Jesus, Manes, I thought you were supposed to be smart!”

“Generational pain.” Alex coughed and let himself, just for a second, lean into Michael’s hand. “Amplified haunt. It’s attacking everyone involved in Project Shepherd.” That was good, in a lot of ways. Wherever they were, the people who were part of this would be struck down, possibly killed. On the other hand – “We have to warn Kyle,” Alex gasped. “And Maria, and Mimi.”

“Shit.” Michael looked up at the pods. “If the ship’s burning up, how’re they gonna –”

“Point of contact was too small.” Alex twisted his wrist to hold onto Michael’s wrist in return. “Everything you’ve salvaged, that would be enough to protect them.” He knew what he was asking, and so did Michael. To his credit, he only hesitated for a second before letting go of Alex’s neck and digging into his pocket for his phone.

“No signal down here.” He straightened and looked at Max and Isobel, beckoning them over. “You two keep Alex alive, I’ll make calls.”

Max was the first to kneel at Alex’s side, and he took his other hand, pressing their palms together. “We’ve got him,” he said. “Run.”

Michael did. 

Alex concentrated on breathing, and blinked when Isobel knelt at his other side and took his other hand. “It’s getting thicker on you,” she said quietly.

“Multiple generations,” he muttered. “Lots of bad blood.”

“What about your brothers?” Max asked.

Alex swallowed. “Their names are in my dad’s files. They’re all involved.”

“Why’d he leave you out?” Isobel sounded genuinely confused. 

“I would’ve compromised his mission.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Because you have morals?”

Alex snorted, closing his eyes against the nearby glow of the pods. “Because I’m gay. That makes me weak, as far as he was concerned.”

“It’s saving your life right now,” Max muttered, looking around. “It’s coming in through the door. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Because this chamber is lead-lined or whatever, right?” Isobel tightened her grip on Alex’s hand – he imagined a wave of distortion rolling down the stairs towards them. He felt it when it hit, his heart clenching painfully in his chest. Guilt and that awful despair crashed through him, dragging him down into a crouch. “Alex?”

“Mm.” He tried to count his breaths. His chest was in a vice, and it was like he was drowning again, just like yesterday when he’d tried to breathe and his lungs had filled with blood instead of air. Not enough oxygen to the brain. He just needed to stay calm. It would get worse if he panicked.

Mind over matter only went so far though. He could tell himself to stay calm as much as he liked, but he couldn’t stop the way his body was reacting.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really.” He pushed the words out past gritted teeth, and Max’s hand tightened around his.

“Can I try something? It might help. I need to touch the handprint though.”

Alex nodded, wheezing slightly as he sucked in as deep a breath as he could manage. “Go for it.”

The fingertips of Max’s other hand pressed briefly to his side, then pushed the hem of his shirt up a bit to slide underneath. Alex turned towards him to make it easier, trying to unbend his spine a little, and Max’s hand flattened against his front, just above his belly where he’d been shot.

Firm reassurance flooded through him, and Alex could breathe again. He celebrated by taking several deep breaths and opening his eyes. “Thanks.” It was intensely weird, to feel someone else’s emotions in his own mind. The only way he could tell they weren’t his was because they had appeared so suddenly.

“Well this is freaky.” Isobel was still holding tightly to his hand. “Do you think moving the pods will make it stop?”

“What’s happening now, with the distortions?” Alex asked.

“Still thick.” Max leaned his chest into Alex’s shoulder, and that helped too. “We’re keeping them off you now though. About half an inch, just like ourselves and the pods. Iz, what –”

“I can move it, look.” Isobel lifted her free hand, and although Alex saw nothing, he felt Max’s amazement, and relief.

“Can you move it away from Alex?” 

“I think so.” Isobel frowned and made a sort of pushing motion. 

“You’re not moving it,” Max said, and excitement rushed through the connection Alex shared with him. “You’re destroying it! How’re you doing that?”

“You sort of…I was trying to copy what Michael does, you know he can use his powers to blast ghosts from a distance, without needing to touch them? I was trying to do that.”

“It doesn’t look the same. When he does it, it’s smooth. You’re, like…tearing it apart.”

“Who cares, as long as it works? Come on, you try.”

“I need both hands for Alex.”

“Let go of my hand,” Alex told him. “The handprint’s doing a better job.”

Max’s concern eddied through Alex’s head at the same time as he looked at him with a worried expression. “You sure?” 

“Yeah, do it.”

Alex kept taking deep, steadying breaths as Max held his hand out like Isobel and frowned. He could feel the concentration echoing from Max to him, making him want to reach out and try too. “How –” Max started.

“Like pushing yourself outwards. Just imagine it,” Isobel instructed. “What does it feel like when you use your powers? Try to do it like that, that’s sort of what I did.”

“How does mind-walking translate to this?”

“I can do anything in there,” Isobel said simply. “Anything at all. This is just the same feeling, in the real world.”

Max grunted, and Alex closed his eyes again, imagining it himself without really meaning to. He had no visual reference for what they were seeing, other than the glitchy contents of the cabinets upstairs, but he imagined the haze like that, and Max and Isobel’s hands projecting power that blew that energy away like smoke.

“I can’t do it,” Max growled, his frustration making Alex frown. He made the effort to calm himself down and tried to project that through their connection. Patience was something he had in spades, after all. He could lend that to Max. “Oh.” Max leaned heavier against his shoulder for a second. “Is that you?”

“Yeah.” Alex breathed in and out on a four-beat count. “Relax.”

“Relax?” Isobel repeated, incredulous. “I can’t do all of this on my own! We only brought two bottles of nail polish remover, and I’m already getting tired!”

“It’s fine,” Alex said slowly. “Don’t think about that. Don’t expend all your energy here and now. The pods are the priority. You just need to wait for Michael to get back so you can move the pods together.”

They were quiet for a moment, the only sounds in the chamber their breathing and the low electric hum of the lights in the walls. One of them flickered, and went out. Familiar alertness spiked in Alex, and he sat up a little straighter, looking around for other things before he remembered his sensitivity was currently being dulled by Max and Isobel. Two of the other lights started to flicker, and Isobel looked around.

“Are we seriously being haunted right now?”

“It’s pretty standard,” Alex said. “Hopefully it won’t manifest by throwing things at us next.”

“Could that happen?” Max asked, alarm both in his voice and bouncing through the handprint to Alex’s mind. He tried to project more calm to counter it.

“It could. But there isn’t much in here that isn’t nailed down in some way – the cables and the empty box and the bracelet are pretty much all it’s got. Just keep your eyes open.”

Upstairs, they heard Williams scream again. Alex knew exactly what he was being forced to experience. In a way, his dad was lucky he was dead. 

The lights went out, flickering one by one until they died and the pods were the only source of light in the chamber. “This feels ominous,” Max drawled. It probably would have been more convincing if Alex hadn’t been able to feel his fear. 

“It’s fine,” he said. “Typical haunt behaviour.” 

His relief mirrored Max’s when they heard footsteps again, and Michael burst through the door, swearing as he ran down the stairs. “I can barely see you guys it’s so thick in here!”

“Kyle and the DeLucas,” Alex said, suddenly very aware of Max’s hand pressed to his chest under his shirt. Knowing Max could feel his embarrassment made it worse, and he did his best to ignore it. “Did you get through to them?”

“Mimi and Maria are okay,” Michael said, out of breath. “Couldn’t get through to Kyle at first, but Maria said she found him and put the necklace on him, and they’re going to my place now.”

“Good.” Alex looked at the pods. “Can you move all three of these at once?”

“I can try.” Michael stepped back and shook his arms out.

“Wait,” Isobel said sharply. They all looked at her. “I have an idea.” She got to her feet and pulled on Alex’s hand, urging him and Max up as well. “Come on.”

“What’re you doing?” Michael asked as she tugged Alex after her as she stepped up onto the pod platform, Max following awkwardly at his side. If it hadn’t been obvious before that Max’s hand was under his shirt, it certainly was now – Alex saw Michael look at it and raise his eyebrows. 

“Get up here,” Isobel said, and Michael obeyed, visibly confused though he was. “Okay, now…” She twisted and manoeuvred them until they were all squashed in the small space in the centre of the pods. “If we touch our pods,” she said, “and each other, and Max keeps his hand on Alex too, I think we can sort of boost our powers to clear this all out.”

“Where’d you get that idea?” Max asked.

“My brain,” she said sarcastically. “Just shut up and try. It’s not like we have anything to lose.”

Alex found himself sandwiched between the three of them, and realised as Max shuffled around him to be able to touch his pod at the same time that he could look at the workbench, and the open glass box on top of it, without agonising pain driving through his skull. He didn’t even see the bracelet for a few seconds, the dim light making it almost invisible on the metal workbench. But there it was. And he was looking at it, without being hurt.

“Guys,” he said, “what’s the haze looking like now?”

“Thick as all hell.” Michael muttered, sliding past Isobel so he could touch his own pod, putting him behind Alex with Max on his right and Isobel on his left.

“Is it still avoiding the bracelet?”

“No,” Max answered. “It’s sort of evenly distributed.”

Alex gently pulled his hand from Isobel’s, and when nothing happened, turned to better face Michael. Max turned too, so he was facing the same direction and didn’t have to cross his arms across his own body to touch Alex and his pod at the same time. Michael frowned at them. “This is weird.”

“Only if you make it weird,” Max said, still looking over at the workbench. “Okay, Iz, now what?”

“Are you both touching your pods?” She turned to look at them all, her back to her pod. “Okay, now, I’m gonna try linking us up in our heads, and then Michael’s gonna blast the hell out of this place. I think you should let go of Alex,” she told Max hesitantly. “I think it might fuck him up otherwise.”

“What if letting go also fucks him up?” Michael asked, worried.

“The effects of a haunt are temporary,” Alex told him, though he quailed a little bit at the prospect of being slammed with those particular effects again. Max’s hand pressed harder against his chest.

“I think we should risk it,” he said, voice low. “I’ll let go if it gets too much.”

Michael looked from Max to Alex, the question clear in his eyes – the final decision was Alex’s to make, and Alex breathed out before he nodded. “Okay. Try it.”

“Alright.” Isobel hummed thoughtfully. “Easiest way to do this…I think it needs to be skin contact.”

“Easy.” Michael reached for the arm Max had curled around Alex and pulled his sleeve up. “We both put our hands on Max’s arm, overlapping.”

“Perfect.” Isobel had to reach around Alex to lay her palm over Max’s arm, just above his elbow, and Michael laid his over both of them, all of them in contact with each other. 

“Weirdest group hug ever,” Alex muttered, and Isobel snorted.

“Alright,” she said. “Here we go.”

Something in Alex’s head shivered. His balance slid sideways for just a second, and he reached up instinctively to grab hold of Michael’s shirt. Fear jumped through him, and embarrassment – knowing the Max could feel everything made it worse, but before he could let go Max pushed a feeling of such warmth through him that Alex’s loosening grip tightened again. Max knew anyway, and he didn’t care. 

And that shivering was getting stronger. Alex lifted his other hand and looked down instead of at Michael as he twisted it in Michael’s shirt too, at his side instead of over his chest. Holding on, just in case his balance slipped again. He trusted Michael to stand still and act as a pillar for him to brace against if he needed it. And something about Max’s continuing reassurance let him do it without embarrassment. 

Confidence, he realised. He’d lent Max calm, and now Max was lending him confidence.

The shivering got stronger, and Alex gritted his teeth against the weirdness of it. When he lifted his gaze, he saw that Michael had closed his eyes, and when he looked he saw that Max and Isobel had as well. The shivering was the echo of the three of them in Isobel’s mind, he figured, and swallowed as it started to make his head ache. It was like there was a balloon behind his eyes, slowly inflating, and he was afraid of what would happen when it got too big to be contained.

Behind Michael, close to the workbench, something appeared in the darkness. Alex’s breath caught as he realised it was an apparition of one of the figures he’d seen when the haunt had hit him in full force. A scientist, dressed all in white, complete with cap and mask so only their eyes were visible. And those eyes were shadowed, the skin around them an unnatural grey. The figure started walking towards them, and Alex tightened his grip on Michael, fear blazing through him. Whether he could see it because the haunt was so strong it was overriding the effects of Max’s touch or because they were all in Isobel’s mind, he didn’t know, but either way it was terrifying.

It wasn’t normally so bad when he saw apparitions, but the memory of being pinned to a table and operated on while still fully conscious was at the front of his mind, and the scientist suddenly had tools in their hands. A scalpel, and some sort of saw. He remembered the way Noah’s skull had been sawn open, and swallowed.

“Guys,” he whispered.

None of them responded. Another white-garbed figure stepped out of the darkness behind the first, and another out of the shadows in the corner at the bottom of the stairs. Alex swallowed and wondered whether they would be able to touch Michael, Max, and Isobel. They were immune to haunts, so surely being in an alien sandwich with the pods an extra layer of protection around them would keep him beyond the reach of those white-gloved hands?

The saw started to buzz, and Alex shuddered, the pressure behind his eyes growing and growing as the scientists walked closer, like they had all the time in the world.

They did. The part of his mind that remembered how it felt to be under their control knew it. He was their prisoner – no, not even that. He was their subject. Just a number, just a specimen. Two more figures emerged out of the dark, and Alex was distantly aware that his breath control had broken down completely. He was trembling, and they were getting closer. The first one, the one with the scalpel and saw, stepped up onto the platform. This close, in the light of the pods, Alex could see that its eyes were black and misshapen. Two vaguely oval holes like sunken pits.

“Guys,” he breathed again, too scared to even raise his voice. “Michael?”

The apparition leaned closer, into the gap between the pods. Alex could smell bleach and blood, and he was so cold he could see his breath misting in the air. The creature passed its scalpel to the hand with the saw and reached out towards him, right over Michael’s shoulder. Alex couldn’t let go of him and couldn’t shrink back. It was going to get him, and he was going to be sedated and drugged and put in a cell where he would never see the light of day again. The only people who would ever touch him were these creatures, and all their touch would bring was pain.

The pressure behind his eyes built to a painful height, and just as the apparition’s gloved fingers were inches from Alex’s face, the pressure broke. Max’s hand on Alex’s chest burned hot, and Michael’s eyes flew open. The apparition flew apart, and so did all the others, and Alex’s bad knee buckled. He barely caught himself in time, his gasp of relief hidden against Michael’s shoulder, and a second later Michael’s arms were around him.

“Got you,” he grunted, and Alex let himself be held for a full second before straightening and leaning back. Max’s hand was sliding out from under his shirt, the skin where it had been feeling oddly raw, and Alex didn’t want to break down in front of any of them.

“Did you do it?” he asked, tensing to stop his teeth chattering.

“We did it.” Isobel sounded tired, but triumphant. “No haze in here at all!”

“Thank fuck.” Alex stepped away from Michael and off the platform. “How’re you guys feeling? Can you move the pods?”

“Give us a second.” Max sat on the edge of the platform, looking a little bit sick. Michael pulled a bottle of nail polish remover from his pocket and passed it to him without a word.

“Okay. I’m going to check on Williams.” Alex nodded to them and headed for the stairs. The lights all flickered on when he was halfway up, and he managed to hold himself together until he was out of their sight, in the corridor beyond the pod chamber.

If he thought about it, he would start screaming. He wanted to carry on like nothing had happened, but on the first step of the stairs his legs wobbled, and he had to slide down to his knees and turn to press his back against the cold concrete wall, pressing a hand over his mouth to muffle his suddenly uneven breathing.

It had been so close. Two inches, maybe less, and it would have touched him. Those black pit eyes would be waiting for him in his dreams, Alex knew it, and he squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hysterical tears.

He couldn’t remember ever having been so scared on a job. His stump ached fiercely; he swore he could feel the end of the bone like it was being sanded down or something. The high-pitched whine of the saw in the apparition’s hand wouldn’t get out of his head. 

He took a deep, shuddering breath and started forcing himself to his feet. Whether he was ready or not didn’t matter. He’d rather walk over hot coals than be found like this by Michael or one of his siblings – by anyone, really – and he’d said he was going to check on Williams, so he was going to check on Williams. If he had to cling to the railing of the stairwell as he climbed the steps, no one had to know but him.

There was no noise as he climbed up to the upper basement level and headed for the cellblock. He knocked on the hatch before he opened it. “Williams? Shit.” 

Williams was dead. There was blood still oozing slowly from his nose and ears, and his open eyes showed the whites of them had gone dark pink, the blood vessels ruined. Alex thought there might be blood at the corner of his open mouth too. Another fatal stroke, like Noah? Or something else?

Haunts didn’t kill people as often as the general population tended to assume, but it happened. Usually the haunt would use the natural environment to its advantage by pushing someone down a flight of stairs or luring them into traffic. Occasionally people were influenced into killing themselves. Deaths like Williams’ were rarer, but not impossible. Very strong haunts were capable of stopping people’s hearts or putting intense pressure on their brains.

It made sense, Alex figured, staring at Williams’ body. The haunt had been very strong.

Kyle.

Alex cursed as he got his phone out and called him. It was answered before the first ring had even finished. “Alex?”

“You’re okay?” Alex leaned against the wall, allowing himself to express his relief since there was no one around to see. He closed the hatch on the cell and closed his eyes. “Did you make it to the bunker?”

“Yeah, just. You and I need to talk. Guerin too.”

“Yeah.” Alex pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“Maria says he’s an alien.”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus Christ. I was really hoping you’d laugh or something.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“There’s some crazy shit down here, Alex.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Alex said sharply. “You can leave now, we’ll find you later.”

“It’s not gonna happen again?”

“It’s over; you can leave the bunker. The cabin should be fine now too.”

“You’re definitely gonna come back, right?” Kyle sounded suspicious. “You’re not gonna just disappear and never tell me about any of this?”

“I’ll kill him if he tries,” Maria said in the background, and Alex’s lips twitched.

“I’m coming back. I just wanted to check in, I’ll talk to you properly later.”

“What time?”

“I don’t know, this evening? I’ll text you.”

“Okay.” Kyle just breathed for a second. “Thanks.”

Alex opened his eyes, hesitating before he said, “You’re welcome.”

He went back down to the pod chamber slowly, deciding on the spot not to go and look at his dad’s body again. He didn’t even look down that end of the corridor. He could make healthy choices, sometimes.

The pods were moving when he went through the door of the chamber, slowly floating up to him in a line. Michael was on the ground, arms up like a conductor, frowning hard. Alex backed out quickly to let the pods through, and heard footsteps on the stairs as Max and Isobel hurried up towards him.

“We can push them from here,” Max called, and the pods stopped. The first was right in front of Alex, hovering in the corridor. The second was right in the doorway, the third behind that. “Alex, can you help?”

“Sure.” He hesitated though. “You don’t mind me touching them?”

“They’re not sacred,” Isobel grumbled. “Just give it a shove.”

Alex touched his fingertips to the pod in front of him. It was warm, the same way the pieces of Michael’s ship console were warm. The surface had a different sort of texture to the console pieces though; slightly rougher, though only a little. He walked round behind it and pushed, and it started to move slowly, though where the resistance was coming from he didn’t know, since it wasn’t touching the ground.

Behind him, Isobel and Max were both pushing their own pods, and Michael slipped past them all to stand at the foot of the stairs, open bottle of nail polish remover in his hand. “I do stairs, you guys do everything else,” he told Alex, who nodded. Experimenting, he tried to give the pod he was pushing more of an upward shove. It didn’t seem to want to move more than a few inches from the ground, and he changed his angle to keep pushing forward instead.

Michael had to run to the bathroom on the ground floor when they reached it to throw up, and Isobel went to check on him while Alex and Max moved their pods out to the van, and then came back to push the last one together.

“We’ll follow you again,” Max said, leaning against the outside of the van. Alex stood next to him, face tilted up to the sun. The memory of the haunt telling him he would never see anything outside of a cell or a lab or concrete corridors was very fresh in his mind. He wasn’t sure if he could have handled going back down into the pod chamber now they’d come out into the open.

He was going to have to update his paperwork to include claustrophobia extending to any underground situation now, probably. A windowless room was not something he ever wanted to be in again.

Michael and Isobel came out together, and Michael groaned when he realised he’d have to levitate the pods into the van. “Shoulda brought more acetone,” he muttered, but shook his hair out of his eyes and lifted the pods into the van with his mind, one at a time. “Reckon they’ll be safe?”

“Try driving a few feet,” Isobel suggested to Max, who nodded and climbed up into the cab. She clambered up into the back and pulled the doors closed, and Alex and Michael stood back as the van engine turned over, and the van rolled forward a few metres, very slowly, before stopping. Alex went to let Isobel out, and she nodded. “They’re fine. They stay right where they are, no sliding around or anything.”

“Thank fuck.” Michael sighed. “Let’s never come back here, okay?”

“Fine by me.” Isobel narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re not planning on driving right now, are you?”

“Nah.” Michael tilted his head in Alex’s direction. “I need a nap. And a snack.”

“You can have both of those things,” Alex said, taking a breakfast bar from his pocket and passing it to him. “Let’s go.”

He and Michael got into the van, and Max got out to join Isobel in Michael’s pickup. Alex flexed his hands on the steering wheel and breathed out as they left Penvale behind them, hopefully forever.

“I don’t think I can sleep,” Michael muttered after a few minutes. “Ugh.”

“You still feel sick?”

“Yeah. Not as bad though. You think Valenti made it?”

“He did, I called him.”

Michael sighed and slumped against the window. “And now he knows about aliens. Fantastic.”

“Well it was either that or let him die, and he might’ve been a dick in high school, but he doesn’t deserve that.”

“Yeah. Wait, how do you know he would’ve died?” Michael frowned at him. 

“I guess I don’t,” Alex allowed. “It’s just a theory. Haunts are usually stronger the closer to the nexus they are, so it might just be Williams.”

“What happened to Williams?” There was a pause. “He died?”

“Yeah. I would’ve too, if you three hadn’t been protecting me. And even then.” He stopped, and Michael nudged his thigh.

“What? We put you right in the middle of us, Max had his healing hand out, you’re telling me you were still in danger?”

“It’s a theory.”

“What happened while we were in Isobel’s head?” Michael asked, sitting up straight again. “And before that, when you let go of me – you collapsed like you were, I don’t know, like you were assuming a brace position or something. Covering your head.”

Embarrassment flushed through him, and Alex shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

Alex didn’t reply. He wanted to ask why, but that would only lead to a discussion of what the hell they were doing now he’d helped Michael find Isobel and Max, and he just couldn’t. Not while he was still feeling shaky from the haunt. Certainly not while he was trapped in a truck with Michael with no escape route.

He was a coward. But there was still so much to do, so many loose ends to tie up, and he needed time. He needed to be sure that Roswell’s haunt activity had returned to normal levels. He needed to talk to Maria and Kyle, and they needed to make a plan for telling Liz and Arturo. He needed to spend another night without Michael pressed warm and tempting against his body. He needed to get his head clear.

They drove on in silence until Michael gave directions for him to turn off the road, near where they’d pulled off the day before to bury Noah. Michael knew the area well, just as he’d said. He directed them along a track wide and flat enough for the van to handle, and finally stopped them at the ridge of a shallow arroyo. 

Like he’d done with the stairs, he was the one to float the pods down the slope, and then Alex, Max, and Isobel took over pushing the pods into a cave he directed them to. The entrance was barely wide enough, and Alex realised as soon as he was standing in the mouth of it that he couldn’t go any further. His hands were trembling just at the prospect, and he was in the process of figuring out how he could repress his claustrophobia long enough to get the job done when a hand touched his shoulder.

He expected Michael, but it was Max instead. Alex guessed he’d felt his fear through the handprint. “We can do it,” Max said quietly. “You should make sure no one comes investigating why there’s a removal van and a pickup doing nothing in the middle of nowhere.”

It was a terrible excuse, and Alex was ashamed to nod and take it anyway. He couldn’t even look at Isobel and Michael as he passed them and headed back up the slope, stump aching. There wasn’t even any excuse he could give if someone came by to investigate, and the likelihood of that even happening was pretty much zero. He was completely useless, and they all knew it. He’d been a liability this whole day, when it came down to it.

Logic countered the self-pity in a move he’d long practiced (without a human there, they might not even have known they needed to open the cabinets, or what would happen if they did), and it was strange, realising that he was hating himself because that was what he always did, rather than as the result of a haunt’s influence. He hadn’t known he could recognise the distinct flavour of his own self-loathing, but there it was.

Alex reached the van and Michael’s pickup and got into the van to get out of the harsh sunlight. His head still ached fiercely, and his hands, he saw when he rested them on his knees, were still trembling. He briefly considered thinking about his newly acquired fear of people in white surgical scrubs and immediately started multiplying random numbers to keep his brain safely occupied. Maria hadn’t been wrong when she’d said he was a champ at repressing things.

At some point, he was going to have to try and get in contact with his brothers to see how badly they’d been affected. He didn’t know whether he hoped they’d been killed or not, and didn’t know how to feel about that.

Michael, Max, and Isobel were underground for quite a long time, but Michael had told them the cave went deep, so Alex tried not to worry. Still, it was a relief when they emerged, and worrying for a different reason when he saw that Max was helping Michael up the hill. He got out of the van at once. “Did something happen?” he asked, when they were close enough.

“Nah.” Michael blinked slowly, the skin of his face pale and clammy. “Just had to use my powers more than I thought. Lotsa ups and downs in there.”

Alex nodded, guilt gnawing at him. “We should head back to town.”

“Where to?” Isobel asked, frowning. “Valenti’s again?”

“Van first, then yeah, Valenti’s. I need to check the Project Shepherd bunker again, we need to remove the surveillance on your houses, Kyle and the DeLucas have to be read in –”

“How about lunch?” Michael interrupted, eyes closing for a second. “I could really use some solid food right about now.”

“Van, Valenti’s, lunch,” Max said firmly. “Let’s go.”

Alex drove again, and the ride back to town was as silent as the ride to the cave had been. It should have been strange, coming back into a Roswell cleared of the haunts that had been infesting it the whole time Alex had been back, but Alex hardly noticed their absence. Max and Isobel idled nearby while Michael and Alex dropped the van back with its owner, a thickset man whose name Alex had already forgotten from that morning. It was unlike him; his memory was usually good, but right now it was fried. He messaged Kyle and Maria to meet them at his condo with as much food from the Crashdown as they could carry.

He and Michael squeezed into the cab of his truck, Alex pressed against the door to try and minimise the amount of contact they had. A fruitless exercise when they were four people squashed onto a bench meant for three. He and Michael were touching from their shoulders to their knees, and Alex wanted stupid things. Even with Michael’s siblings right there, or maybe especially with them there, he wished he could slide down and lean his head on Michael’s shoulder, or encourage Michael to do so. He wished he could turn his face into Michael’s hair and breathe in. He wished he could enjoy the contact rather than being hyper-aware of it in an uncomfortable way.

“It’s over now, right?” Max asked in his deep deputy’s drawl when they were nearly at Kyle’s. “We can go home again?”

“I wouldn’t sleep there yet, just in case.” Alex didn’t look at any of them. “Get what you need and then stay at a motel or something. Just till I can rule out any possibility of someone else taking over the Project and trying to grab you again.”

“How long will that take?” Isobel asked, sounding like she would have quite liked to be sharp, but it came out bewildered instead.

“I don’t know. I’ll go through everything as fast as I can.” Alex held himself still, feeling Michael’s shoulder move against his as he breathed, and sighed internally in relief when there were no more questions. “Max, you’ll know the answer to this – what’s the best way to call in an anonymous tip that can’t be ignored and can’t be traced?”

“You wanna call in a tip on Penvale?” Max frowned. “I don’t know. That’s not Chaves County, it’s Eddy.”

“Does it make a difference?” Michael asked.

“Can do. I can check though, and I can call it in.”

“Are you sure?” Alex checked. 

“Least I can do.” Max pushed a hand through his hair. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”

Alex worried, but he wanted to trust Max. He did already, he realised with an odd little lurch, and figured it had to be the influence of the handprint, which was a bit disturbing. 

Maria’s red pickup was outside Kyle’s condo when they got there, and the smell of burgers and fries wafted out when Kyle opened the door. “Wow,” he said, looking at them and then standing back quickly to let them in. “Uh, come in. Maria said you guys got kidnapped?”

“Abduction sounds funnier.” Michael went in first, inhaling deeply, and Alex followed. He would have preferred to be the last one in, but he didn’t want Isobel and Max to feel like he was hovering over them. 

The balanced ratio calmed him a little. Three aliens to three humans. When he got into the main room, he smiled to see Maria hugging Michael, Michael looking a little shell-shocked by the embrace. “Calm down, DeLuca,” he said, wrapping his arms around her so carefully he might have thought she was made of spun sugar. “Don’t get tears on my shirt.”

“Ugh.” She pulled back and punched him gently in the shoulder. “I’m not crying, you asshole!” She turned and opened her arms to Alex, who went into them and held on tight.

“How’s Mimi?” he whispered.

“She’s good.” Maria leaned back, eyes definitely sparkling. “She came home with me yesterday afternoon, and she’s…oh my God, Alex, she’s completely back to normal. She knows who I am, all the time!”

He grinned and hugged her again, and she sniffed a bit as she squeezed him back. “That’s amazing.”

Behind him, Kyle sat at the table and encouraged Isobel and Max to do the same. “Help yourself. We got enough to feed an army, it looks like. Dig in.”

Alex started pulling back, and blinked when Maria kissed his cheek. “You eating too?”

“Yeah,” he said, but looked over at Kyle first and tilted his head in the direction of the hallway. 

“Hey,” Isobel said, catching it immediately and narrowing her eyes at them both. “If we can’t have secrets anymore, no one else gets to either.”

“This is private,” Alex said firmly, letting Maria step away and beckoning to Kyle again. “We’re still allowed privacy.”

She looked like she was going to argue, but Max turned to whisper something into her ear, and she huffed. Alex took advantage of the distraction to nod to Kyle, who got up and followed him into the hallway. “What?” he asked quietly. 

“We’re going to eat first,” Alex murmured, “but we have something to tell you and Maria about Rosa’s death. We’re going to be telling Liz and her dad too, but I wanted to check with you first whether you want to tell everyone about Rosa being your sister too. It’s not something that’s related to her death, so you don’t have to tell anyone about it if you don’t want to. You only found out a couple days ago.”

Kyle blinked, and fell backwards to lean against the wall with the easy familiarity of someone who knew his home well. “I haven’t even talked to my mom about it. I don’t know if…I don’t know if she knew, or if I even want to talk to her about it.”

Alex nodded. “That’s fair. It’s your decision.”

“I think…” Kyle licked his lips and glanced over at the table uncertainly. “I think I wanna talk to Liz about it first. She should know first. You’re gonna find her?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Alex nodded. “Good.” He turned and went back to the table, sitting down between Michael and the empty seat at the head of the table Kyle had been sitting in, and then returned to. “Everyone gets to eat at least a whole burger before we start bringing everyone up to speed,” he said, grabbing a wrapped package and tearing it open, the smell of food making him ravenous. “Otherwise it’ll just go cold.”

“Works for me,” Michael muttered, mouth full of fries.

Miraculously, everyone seemed either hungry or intimidated enough to go along with it. Kyle and Maria kept shooting Michael, Max, and Isobel looks when they thought they weren’t looking, and Alex hoped he would at least be able to finish his burger before Isobel snapped at them for it. Max looked like he was eating his last meal before his execution. Michael seemed to just be trying to eat as much as he could as fast as he could.

“Okay,” Alex said finally. He had two bites of burger left, but everyone apart from him and Maria had finished theirs, and Isobel looked like she was half a second from committing a murder for real. “Do any of you want to give Kyle and Maria the condensed version of the story of your lives on Earth?”

“We crashed, we’re stuck here,” Michael grunted. “What more is there to know?”

“_When_ did you crash?” Kyle asked immediately. “And is the ’47 crash real too?”

“Oh wow.” Michael blinked at him and exchanged a look across the table with Max and Isobel. “Okay, yeah, you really don’t know anything.”

“That was us, in 1947,” Max said gruffly. “We don’t remember it, and we didn’t actually, uh, join human society till fifty years later.”

Alex finished off his burger and started in on the hash browns while between them, Michael, Max, and Isobel filled Kyle and Maria in on the rough outline of their time on Earth, briefly mentioning their powers and how they related to Earth’s haunts, how they’d grown up in Roswell in hiding, and gotten captured by Jesse Manes.

“Where is he now?” Maria asked, looking worriedly at Alex. “Isn’t he gonna come after you?”

“He’s dead,” Alex said lightly. “So we don’t have to worry about him anymore.” And wasn’t that something, to say that out loud and know it was true? “I need to double and triple check, but since he was running Project Shepherd illegally, there should be no further threat from the government or the military in the future.”

“Okay.” Kyle gave them all a cautious look. “So that’s it? You guys were illegally detained for, what, ten, eleven days, and…that’s fine? No one’s going to face any repercussions for that?”

“You mean other than Alex’s dad dying?” Maria said, sounding slightly appalled. Kyle winced.

Alex just shrugged and reached for another bag of fries. “He deserved worse. And yeah, no official repercussions, but I’m fairly confident that everyone who was involved in Project Shepherd was so severely haunted today that they might also be dead or injured, or at the very least seriously deterred from continuing, especially with my dad no longer footing the bill.”

Maria frowned, biting her lip. “How’re you gonna find out?”

“Call around. Starting with my brothers.” He gave her a humourless smile. “Oh yeah, they’re all involved. You can leave that to me though,” he added. “They’re my problem. It’s Rosa you need to know about, and Noah Bracken.”

“Your husband?” Maria looked at Isobel, whose lip curled. She looked down at the table, shoulders hunched, and Max shifted – taking her hand under the table, Alex guessed.

“I’m gonna have to declare him missing, aren’t I?” Isobel muttered. “Fuck.”

“If you want to step out or something while I tell them,” Alex started, but Isobel shook her head, tossing her hair back from her face and looking first at Maria, then Kyle with a defiant expression.

“Noah was an alien too. He’s been murdering people for the past thirteen years, and he used my body to start with Rosa Ortecho. I didn’t find out till we were captured, and then Max and I killed him to protect Michael.”

Maria covered her mouth with her hand, eyes wide, and Kyle blinked at her. “When you say he was using your body…”

“Like possession,” Alex said quietly. “Except far stronger.”

“And I have literally no memory of it.” Isobel gave Kyle a brittle smile. “I’ve been having a really great week.”

Maria had tears in her eyes, and she looked at Alex like she was begging him to tell her it wasn’t true. He sighed. “We’re going to tell Liz and Arturo. We can’t change the way people blamed Rosa for Kate and Jasmine’s deaths, but –”

“They still do,” Maria said hoarsely, dropping her hand from her mouth. “Arturo still gets his windows smashed in most years on the anniversary of their deaths. Someone tried shooting the place up a couple of years ago – if he hadn’t been in the kitchen, he could have died.”

Michael rubbed his hands over his face, and Alex didn’t understand the alarm on Max’s face until Michael said, “We covered her murder up.”

Maria froze. “What?”

“Max and me, we found Isobel with the bodies, but we knew it wasn’t really her. We just didn’t know what really happened.” Michael looked at the table, rubbing the scarred part of his left hand. “We covered it up to protect her, and we didn’t even tell her about it.”

“What…what?” Maria looked between them all, swiping a tear away from one eye. “Are you serious?”

“We’re going to make it right,” Alex said, before it could get out of hand. “Or as right as we can. There’s no way to make what really happened common knowledge without putting Michael, Max, and Isobel at risk, but we can at least tell Liz and Arturo the truth.”

“I…” Maria shook her head and got to her feet. “I need a minute.” She went to the bathroom and locked herself in, and a very awkward silence drifted across the table.

At the other end of the table, Kyle put his head in his hands, fingers digging into his hair. “Fuck.”

“Pretty much.” Alex finished his fries and licked his fingers clean before reaching for one of the sodas that hadn’t been claimed by anyone yet. 

“When’re you gonna call your brothers?” Kyle asked, head still down.

“Not right away.” Alex had thought about this. “If they are all dead, it’s going to look weird enough that everyone in my family except me got struck down by what looks like a curse at the same time anyway. I don’t want to make it look worse by calling them one at a time. Plausible deniability, y’know?”

Max frowned. “You don’t seem exactly…I don’t know, upset? That your brothers might be dead?”

“How many do you have anyway?” Isobel asked.

Kyle and Alex said, “Three,” at the same time, and Alex tapped his fingers against the lid of his soda cup, looking down before meeting Max’s eyes. “Not all of us like our siblings. You’re pretty lucky, you know.”

“I am,” Max agreed, looking at Isobel, and then Michael. Alex looked back down at his fingers, the tips wet where condensation had beaded on the outside of the cheap cardboard cup. Max cleared his throat, shifting in his chair. “We should get going. Start getting back to our lives.”

“I need another shower,” Isobel muttered. “And some of my stuff. I’m not sleeping in my bed ever again.” She and Max got to their feet, but Michael leaned back in his chair and looked at Alex, one eyebrow raised.

“I’ll stay here a bit,” Alex told him. “I need to talk to Maria, and Mimi. She’ll give me a lift.”

Michael nodded and stood up. “Okay. Keys,” he said to Max, who tossed them over, and the three of them headed for the door. They’d just walked out when Maria came out of the bathroom. She cast one look at the table, then followed them out, calling Isobel’s name. Alex cursed internally, but before he could get up too, Kyle shook his head.

“I always wanted a brother, you know that?”

“What?” Distracted, Alex didn’t really hear him for a second, and then, “You did?”

“Yeah.” Kyle rubbed his hands over his face, his hair sticking up from running his fingers through it. “You knew that, I told you that when we were kids.”

“Before you decided you’d rather pretend we’d never been friends,” Alex said acidly. “Let alone pretended to be brothers.” He’d forgotten that, and it still stung. Kyle had wanted Alex to be his brother, and Alex had told him he’d have Kyle over one of his three real brothers any day. 

He half expected Kyle to protest, or to say that he’d already apologised, so Alex didn’t need to keep going on about it. But Kyle just nodded. “I was a dick. You know how many people I still talk to from high school?”

“More than I do, I bet.”

Kyle shook his head. “I follow them all on Facebook, and I met up with a couple of them over the years, but I’m not really friends with any of them anymore. I was a real idiot. I should’ve stuck with you. I actually like you as an adult.”

Alex snorted. “You’ve known adult me less than like, two days.”

“Yeah.” Kyle gave him a wry look. “And I already like you more than my old high school buddies. Says a lot about the kind of guys I was hanging out with, right?” He looked at the door and shook his head. “I wanted a brother and I got a sister. A dead one. What a fucking week.”

“You’re telling me.” Alex got up to start clearing the table, and rolled his eyes when Kyle jumped to his feet and scowled at him, flapping his hands to try and get Alex to sit down again.

“Don’t be an idiot, I’m the host.”

“You already let us all crash here last night, I’d say you’ve done your part,” Alex said, resolutely gathering up burger wrappers and empty soda cups.

“Please, don’t pretend letting you guys sleep in an apartment I’m not even using right now was really putting myself out.”

“You owed Michael a favour and now you don’t.” Alex shrugged. “That’s all there is.”

“Michael, huh?” Kyle raised his eyebrows, and Alex gave him a flat look. “Hey.” Kyle lifted his hands, still holding trash in both. “No judgement, I respect your choices.”

Alex shook his head and went to dump what he’d collected in the kitchen, most of him still incapable of believing that Kyle meant it, still half sure he’d hear a cruel joke the second his back was turned. All that happened was Kyle following him with the rest of the trash and getting a sponge to wipe down the table.

And then Maria came back in, and Alex turned around to see her walking towards him with tears on her cheeks. He hugged her because he could tell that was what she wanted him to do, and after a few moments Kyle cleared his throat from behind them both. “I can go, if you guys wanna talk?”

“No, it’s okay.” Maria sniffed and pulled back, mascara smudged under her eyes. “I had to tell her – I thought her husband was cheating on her when he came to the Pony. I saw him a couple of times with women there, when his firm worked Ranchero Night.”

“Shit.” Kyle exhaled heavily. “Was she pissed?”

“Yeah.”

“Mimi wouldn’t have told either,” Alex said quietly, turning to keep them both in his sights. “Bartenders keep secrets, right? They don’t spread them around.”

Maria nodded, wiping at her eyes and grimacing when her fingertips came away black. “I have makeup wipes in my bathroom,” Kyle offered, and at Alex’s raised eyebrows, added defensively. “For guests, not me.”

“Hey, no judgement,” Alex said, dry as sand. “I respect your choices.”

Kyle snorted, and as Maria went to take advantage of whatever supplies Kyle had in his bathroom, Alex couldn’t hold back a smirk.

The light mood didn’t last. He had work to do. Maria had a mother to check on. Kyle had a night shift to prepare for. He collected his things and left with Maria, relaxing in her company more than he had in Kyle’s.

“What’re you gonna do now?” Maria asked quietly. “I mean, assuming Project Shepherd is over?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Guerin? Have you talked to him yet?”

Alex shook his head slowly, not looking at her. “I was going to. Or…I was getting closer to it, anyway. And then I found out about Rosa.”

Maria nodded, hands tight on the steering wheel. “I know it wasn’t really them, but…”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed darkly. “Makes no difference to Rosa, does it? She’s dead and her dad’s still getting his diner windows smashed in over a decade later. Small town memories.”

“It’d put a dampener on any relationship.” Maria sniffed and tucked her hair behind her ear before glancing over at him. “What the hell are you going to tell Liz?”

“The truth. I just need to figure out how to approach it.”

“Let me help, okay? Seriously, you don’t need to do this alone.” She reached out and took his hand, and he closed his eyes.

“Tough habit to break,” he said, forcing the words out past his teeth.

“I’ll break it for you if you break it for me,” she said quietly, squeezing his hand. “You know how many friends I have in this town? It ain’t many.”

Like mother like daughter. Everyone loved the bartender till they ran out of money. Everyone loved Mimi until she told them something about themselves they didn’t want to hear. At least no one ever flirted with Alex to try and get him to banish an extra ghost.

“You need to get anything from Guerin’s?” Maria asked. “You’ve been staying with him, haven’t you?”

“How…” He glared at their hands and Maria snorted.

“No psychic stuff. He mentioned it outside, that’s all.”

“Oh.” Well that was embarrassing. “Nah, I got everything I need.”

“You can stay at mine if you need to. You could’ve before.”

“I needed Guerin.” Fuck. “I mean, not – their presence disrupts haunts and I was being haunted, before we figured out I could wear a bit of his ship as an amulet I needed to stay close.”

“In touching distance?” Maria said slyly.

“Yes.”

“Bet that was a hardship.”

“You said he smells like a river.”

“I also said he got kinda hot,” she reminded him. “Don’t deflect. The way he looks at you, I don’t think he ever got over you either.”

Alex shook his head. “It’s been an intense few days, that’s all.”

“Why are you so reluctant to believe he might feel the same way about you as you do about him?”

“Why are you so determined to think he does?” Alex asked sharply. “It’s complicated,” he said after an uncomfortable moment’s silence. “I can’t think about it yet.”

“You said you couldn’t think about it while the Evans twins were missing,” Maria said quietly. “You can’t make excuses forever.”

“The potential threat Project Shepherd poses isn’t an excuse.”

Maria shrugged. “Alright. But as someone who’s been left behind by most people she cares about in her life, I gotta tell you, it fucking sucks.”

“Noted.”

However sharp the words they exchanged, Maria didn’t let go of his hand, and Alex didn’t let go of hers. That was what family was supposed to be, he’d heard. 

“Don’t tell Mimi about Rosa yet,” Alex said just before they pulled up at the DeLuca house. “Liz should find out first.”

“You just don’t want her losing her shit about evil aliens again,” Maria snorted, parking up and unbuckling her seatbelt.

“I mean, that’d be a bonus.”

“My lips are sealed, don’t worry.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek before he got out, and just like after she’d done it at Kyle’s, he froze for a second. He was just unused to spontaneous physical affection, he guessed.

He got more of it when they got inside and Mimi wrapped him up in a tight hug before the door was even closed behind him. It took a second before he hugged her back, and when she didn’t loosen her grip he didn’t either. He’d forgotten that about Mimi, the way she always knew exactly what he needed. She was the only adult who’d ever given him any real physical affection. He never got too old for her to kiss his cheeks or wrap an arm around his shoulders.

She gave him a long look when she did draw back, hands on his elbows. “Your father,” she said slowly. “Where is he?”

“Dead.” He wondered if she could feel his lack of grief, his lack of regret. Or maybe she couldn’t feel things that weren’t there, and the way she narrowed her eyes at him was because what she could feel was his relief. 

“How?” she asked quietly.

“Shot.” He didn’t want to tell her he’d done it, even if he didn’t regret it. “It doesn’t matter. He’s gone. I’m not sorry.”

Mimi nodded slowly, and reached up to smooth a hand over his hair. “He wasn’t a good man.”

“No.”

“He hurt you.”

“He shot me.” Alex stepped backwards and pulled up the hem of his shirt to show off the still-shimmering handprint on his skin. Mimi’s hands jumped to her mouth, and behind her Maria came forward with wide eyes.

“What the hell is that?”

“Max has healing abilities, remember?” Alex looked down at the handprint too. He guessed that the bullet had hit either the cage arch or his sixth rib, close to where it joined the big bone down the front, whatever that was called, and either pushed on through or broken the bone so badly the shards had pierced his lung. The palm of the handprint was there, in any case, almost dead centre, Max’s fingers and thumb clearly defined. The tip of the middle finger was about an inch below his sternum. “I’m not sure what happened to the bullet,” he said, making sure to sound unconcerned. “I don’t think Max knows either. It’s like their abilities are instinctive – he doesn’t need to know what my injury is in order to heal it.”

“They leave those marks when they kill,” Mimi breathed, her fingers still pressed to her lips. “Alex…”

“Killing and healing are two sides of the same process,” Maria said quietly. “Remember? You always told me that.”

“He saved my life,” Alex said, lowering his shirt. “I’d be dead now if Max hadn’t healed me.”

“And your dad did that?” Maria sounded more upset than he was, which was say, she sounded upset. “He tried to kill you?”

Alex shrugged one shoulder. “Can’t say I was exactly surprised. His priority was the mission, which at that point was keeping Max and Isobel imprisoned for him and his people to experiment on. Sacrifices have to be made in war.”

“We’re not in a war!” Maria protested.

“He thought we were.” Mimi finally lowered her hands and shook her head. “He always saw it like that.”

“Except a war requires two aggressors,” Alex said. “What he was doing was something else entirely.”

Mimi shook her head again and gestured him inside. “Come on, you look like you could use a drink, even if it’s just coffee.”

“Coffee would be great,” he agreed, setting his bag down by the couch and going over to the kitchen bar with her and Maria. Coffee, soothing Mimi, and then starting the next phase of the work. Those were his priorities now.

**From: Guerin [19:07]**  
Hey, just checking you’re still with DeLuca? Max called in the tip about PV btw, says it’s taken care of.

Alex stared at the message on the screen of his phone and didn’t open it. “Can I stay over?” he asked out loud. He was still sitting at the DeLucas’ kitchen bar, laptop and notepad and scraps of paper spread out around him. The DeLucas themselves were curled up together on the couch, the TV on some shopping channel in the background as they murmured to each other.

“Sure, hon,” Mimi said after a moment. “As long as you need.”

“Thank you.”

Alex picked his phone up and thought his reply through before he opened the message to actually type and send it.

**To: Guerin [19:09]**  
Staying the night, still working. Will update tomorrow.

He couldn’t think about Michael right now. He kept it pushed down, where it wouldn’t creep up on him and do something awful like send him spiralling into a panic attack or start unloading his fears onto poor Maria, who’d definitely suffered enough when it came to listening to his neurotic bullshit.

“How’s it going?” Maria asked, getting up to come over and get something out of the fridge. Beer, Alex saw, and nodded when she lifted it with a raised eyebrow. She got two more out and snapped the top off before handing it to him.

“Good.” He took a small sip. “For a given value of good.”

“Your brothers?” Maria asked, almost whispering.

“One alive, two unknown.” Alex tipped more beer into his mouth, holding it there to fizz bitter on his tongue and against his teeth before he swallowed. “Of the others involved, not counting Williams and my dad, I’ve found two other possible fatalities so far and three more who look like they were admitted to hospital following haunts that seriously injured them.”

“How many more left to find?”

“Still a few.” Another sip. “It’s slow going. I can’t do much just with an internet connection.”

“Don’t do anything dangerous, okay?” Maria said sternly. “I know you feel responsible for this because your family was involved, but that doesn’t mean you should sacrifice yourself or anything like that. I’m making shakshuka, do you want any?”

“My family was more than _involved_,” Alex muttered. “They ran the whole thing. Yeah, please.”

The couch creaked as Mimi got up and came over to join Maria in the kitchen, squeezing Alex’s shoulder as she passed him. “Don’t take on burdens that belong to other people, Alex.”

Someone had to though, that was the thing. The burden might belong to his brothers now his dad was dead, but Alex knew none of them could be trusted to do the right thing. It was up to him, and he preferred that. At least he could be sure the job would get done this way.

Mimi went to bed at eleven. Maria stayed up and read through the notes Alex had been making as he went along, adding her own additions with a green biro. “Like high school all over again,” she muttered, reshuffling two piles of paper to fit whatever new system she’d created.

“With fewer scented gel pens,” Alex said, rubbing his eyes. 

“I might have a few upstairs still, if you’re in the mood for nostalgia.”

“Nah.” He sighed and sat back in his chair, looking at the piles of notes spread across the kitchen bar. “So, you’ve made them smaller, but there are more of them.”

“Uh huh. Grouped by theme now, not time, because that system really wasn’t working for you.” She patted his shoulder.

“Theme?”

“Yeah.” She touched each pile quickly with long-nailed fingertips. “Personnel details, security measures, experiments on aliens, experiments on their ship, experimental developments, location details, tech-related stuff that doesn’t seem to be experimental, observations on alien behaviour – those were incredibly disturbing by the way – lists of equipment, finances, and two piles of stuff I couldn’t understand, so you should go through those.”

Alex nodded. “Thanks. And yeah, you think my notes on their observations are disturbing, you really don’t want to read the actual observations.”

Maria blanched. “I can’t imagine it. Crashing on a completely different planet and being imprisoned and experimented on until you just…die.”

“Unless there are some still alive.”

“My mom said they were all dead now.” Maria frowned at him, leaning away. 

“Your mom was told all sorts of things by Jim Valenti and my dad.” Alex shook his head and reached over to tap the equipment list pile. “There are food orders in here for more people than the Project was employing. And the money trail is a mess. It’s bigger than I thought. I’ve got everything on my dad’s phone now, and I’m pretty sure he was using burners for some of the more sensitive stuff. His location data shows him driving to all sorts of weird places, and some of those places match up with facilities I know belong to Project Shepherd.”

Maria looked from him to his laptop to the piles of paper. “Alex, are you saying you think there might still be aliens who are alive?”

“Maybe.” Alex sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t want to say yes or no either way at this point.”

“You’ll break their hearts if you say yes and it turns out to be untrue.”

“Exactly. But it’s just as bad if I say no and then it turns out I was wrong. Especially if – I’m just thinking, you know, what if there’s a facility out there like Penvale, with alien captives who are being kept there right now, and the guards have just been haunted either to death or serious injury today? Who’s bringing those captives their next meal?”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. But I need to be sure.”

“Can I help?”

The part of him that was still aware of the fact that sharing military data was a crime flinched, but the more practical side of him won out. “You have a laptop, right?”

“Yeah?”

“If I give you a load of files to look through, do you think you could do that? Till one of us collapses from sleep deprivation?”

“You know me,” Maria smirked. “I’m a night owl.”

She got her laptop, made a pot of coffee, and pestered him to move everything to the dining table so they’d have more space to spread out. “You could take your leg off, you know,” she added, moving the final piles of paper. “Isn’t it like contact lenses?”

Alex was startled into laughter. “How is a prosthetic leg like contact lenses?”

Maria shrugged. “Mine make my eyes sting if I leave them in for more than sixteen hours or so.”

“Oh.” He considered it, paying attention to his body for the first time in what must have been hours. “I guess. I’ll do it when I go to bed, it’ll just be more effort if I do it now.” His stump ached, but he didn’t want to get up. It was uncomfortable enough remembering that Isobel and Max had both seen him without his prosthesis; he didn’t want to add Maria to that list too.

Maria nodded and ducked her head, focusing on her laptop again. It took Alex a few minutes to turn his mind back to the work though, wondering what Michael was doing right now, and thinking about what Maria had told him on the way here. 

He wasn’t an idiot. He knew he had a problem with running away and trusting people. But it was all such a mess in his head right now, everything strained through the knowledge that his blood was inextricably tied to the atrocities he was reading about. Project Shepherd was his legacy.

It was almost three in the morning when Maria whispered, “Alex?”

“Mm?”

“Remaining subjects terminated October twelfth, twenty-eighteen.”

Alex blinked the tiredness from his eyes and looked at her, an awful feeling settling in his stomach. “Remaining subjects?”

“Terminated,” Maria confirmed, still looking at her laptop screen with a broken sort of expression. “Subjects…where was that list?”

“Here.” Alex passed the paper to her. He’d pieced together all the subject records from the experiments and behaviour analysis files about an hour ago to confirm the existence of ninety-three live survivors of the crash, more than he’d originally thought. Two dozen had died shortly after capture. A further fifty had died over the next twenty years. The remaining nineteen had been unaccounted for, and Alex had been starting to hope, until Maria had spoken.

He watched her eyes flick back and forth between the paper and her screen, and when she started shaking her head, he closed his eyes. “They match?”

“Yeah.” She sniffed. “_Fuck._”

Alex took a deep breath and reached for the piece of paper he’d titled Significant Dates, and added 10/12/18 to it. “Does it say why?”

“Of course not.” She made a disgusted sound and closed her laptop. “I’m done. You need to go to sleep too, come on.”

He was too tired to argue. 

Maria’s bedroom smelled faintly of incense, and she undressed in front of him with the same lack of modesty she’d had as a teenager. Alex wished he could keep his liner on all night, reluctant to let her see the scarred, bulbous shape of his residual limb. While he was hesitating, sat on the edge of the bed nearest the door, Maria yawned and crawled under the covers. “Turn the light off when you’re done, okay?”

She even had her back to him. Alex breathed out, a huge, grateful fondness for her blooming in his chest. “I will. Night.”

“Night.”

He made sure his clean liner was nearby and pulled his leg off quietly, putting that day’s liner on the floor to wash in the morning. In the dim light of the bedside lamp, he examined his stump, wrapping his hands around it to dig in and ease some of the ache. Why he was even bothered by the idea of Maria seeing it, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like he’d cared about Michael seeing it. Or at least, he’d been so sex-drunk he hadn’t minded that first night in Las Cruces, and after that Michael had seen everything.

The scars were white, the hair on the skin sparse and thin. He ran his fingertip along the line that cut across where his shin had been, the half-ring around his calf where the skin had been pulled up and over his sawn-off bone and trimmed muscle and sealed in place. It wasn’t terrible. He knew that, objectively. He had photographs of what it had been like just after the operation, and the difference between then and now was tremendous. In size alone, his residual limb had been so swollen after that first operation that any touch was painful.

He dug his knuckles into the base of the stump and told himself he was amazed at what the human body could recover from. His first physiotherapist had told him that the human body was a medical marvel, and he might not appreciate it then, but one day he would. Alex was still waiting.

He sighed and twisted to lie down under the covers before turning out the bedside lamp. Maria’s bedroom was warm, and he pushed the sheets down to his waist, and then on a hunch lifted the neck of his t-shirt and looked down at his chest.

Max’s handprint glowed faintly, and Alex smiled, amused despite himself. It was a serious matter, sure, but on the other hand (ha) it did look like a remnant of a neon and glitter paint party in a nightclub. 

He let go of his shirt and yawned, finally closing his eyes.


	8. Tuesday 31st August 2021

Alex was dreaming he was working with Liz and Rosa in the Crashdown and they were forcing him to wear the antenna. So it was something of a surprise when he jerked awake with a gasp, adrenaline flooding through his body so fast he sat up and almost got out of bed. 

That was the bit that stopped him where he was, because he’d swung his right leg out and felt an odd lurch when no foot hit the floor.

On his other side, Maria rolled over and mumbled, “Alex?”

“Sorry,” he said automatically, pressing his hand to his heart, which – wasn’t racing, which was even weirder, because he could swear he could feel his pulse in his ears. 

“Nightmare?”

“No.” Alex slid his hand down his chest and closed his eyes when he figured out what was happening. “Not mine. I think Max’s.”

“The hell?”

Alex slid his hand under his shirt and pressed his palm to the handprint. The shaky, post-nightmare feeling strengthened, and he sighed and tried to convey a sense of calm and safety. “The handprint, it kind of links me and Max together, psychically. It’s not strong, but I think he just had a nightmare.”

“Wow, that sucks.” Maria made a disgruntled noise. “Ugh, it’s five in the morning. Go back to sleep.”

“I’ll try. Sorry I woke you up.” Alex lay down again and hoped he’d drop off soon. He left his hand where it was, figuring his lethargy could only help soothe Max’s nerves. And after a few minutes, he was pretty sure the weird little bubble of gratitude he suddenly felt out of nowhere was actually from Max.

It was the thing he needed to relax properly and slip back to sleep.

Maria’s bedroom didn’t have blinds or even proper curtains, and Alex ended up dragging his shirt off and draping it across his eyes at some godforsaken too-early hour to try and get more sleep. It was a mostly fruitless attempt. 

Maria gave up at some point and left him in bed, and Alex rolled over and buried his face in the pillow, his dreams half-formed and fragmented as he drifted in and out of sleep. When he finally gave up, his phone on the floor told him it was half past eight, and he had a message.

**From: Unknown [06:55]**  
Hi, it’s Max. Do you want to meet somewhere today? Still don’t know if it’s safe to go home.

Since he was alone, Alex allowed himself a quiet groan. 

“Hey, Alex!” Maria shouted from outside the bedroom – from the kitchen, maybe.

Alex reached for his crutches. “What?”

“You want breakfast?”

“Can I shower first?”

“Stop yelling!” Mimi shouted, and Alex grinned as he pushed himself up onto his foot, testing the grip of the crutches on Maria’s bedroom floor.

“Sorry!” he called, and stepped out into the hallway, still shirtless, just as Maria came round the corner. It knocked the wind out of him for a second, expecting Maria to look at his stump and say something horribly sympathetic, or just make that awful pitying face people made sometimes when they realised he only had one good leg. But although Maria looked, her eyes flicked up to his again immediately, and her expression didn’t change at all. Alex’s relief was so strong he reckoned Max could probably feel it, and they both smiled at each other, Maria’s eyes sparkling. “You okay?” he asked, noticing.

“Yeah, just.” She waved a hand back at the main room. “Mom. Still getting used to this. I need to give Guerin a gift basket or something.”

“Clear his tab?” Alex suggested, and she made an affronted face.

“The tab is sacred. It’s the principle of the thing.”

Alex snorted. “Whatever. Can I borrow a towel?”

“Yeah, sure.” She went past him back into her bedroom, and he leaned against the doorframe to watch as she opened her closet and dragged a beach towel out of a pile of sheets. “Waffles when you’re done?”

“You know how to treat a guy,” he said dryly, and she snorted as she threw the towel at him.

“Make it quick if you want your coffee hot.”

He draped the towel over his shoulder and saluted, sloppy and sarcastic, before going into the bathroom. He supposed he cared so much more about Maria’s reaction to his leg than Max’s or Isobel’s because she was actually his friend. Rejection was always more painful when it came from a closer quarter.

He told Maria Max had texted when he got out of the shower, and at her suggestion arranged for everyone to meet at the Wild Pony. She’d kept it closed the night before because Mimi had taken priority, but Alex knew how tight the margins had to be in a business like that. “I had cover for Sunday,” she assured him when he mentioned it. “And Monday night’s never that busy, wasn’t so much of a loss.”

Kyle was working, but Michael, Max, and Isobel met him, Maria, and Mimi at the Pony. Mimi was openly wary, but then so were Isobel and Michael. Max was the one making the effort to bridge the gap, aided substantially by Maria.

Michael kept looking at him, and Alex didn’t know what to do with that. He stuck to what he’d found out, to laying out the facts as he’d discovered them with Maria. 

Michael walked out when they told him, Max, and Isobel that they were the only survivors left. Isobel was the one to follow him, and Max just sighed. “Always figured we were alone,” he muttered. “Better to try and integrate than wish on stars.”

Alex couldn’t tell if the bone-deep sadness was his or Max’s, and didn’t mention it. He transferred everything he had to Michael’s laptop, which he’d brought along, and promised to keep digging for certainties on the rest of the people his dad had been illegally employing. 

“Any word from your brothers yet?” Max asked.

Alex shook his head. “I’ll let you know when I hear anything.”

It was soothing, dealing with Max instead of Michael. Whether it was because of the temporary psychic link or because Max was treating everything as if it was a case he was investigating on behalf of some other wronged citizen, Alex didn’t know, and it was another thing he was, for once, uninterested in exploring. Right now, any avenue that offered a slightly easier path through the mess they were in was worth taking.

The aliens left, and Alex stayed. He sat at the bar while Mimi and Maria put music on and cleaned, bickered with each other, did a stock take together, cried, gossiped, organised the week’s staff rota, danced, and split up in what was clearly a routine to tackle different jobs, well-honed if currently wobbly. Mimi went out to get the float for that night from the bank while Maria stayed in and checked the inventory.

At three in the afternoon, just before the bar opened, Alex got a call from an unknown number

When he picked up, he said nothing, and knew it was one of his brothers when silence greeted him. Never say more than you absolutely had to – one of their dad’s rules they’d all absorbed. 

The brother, whichever it was, broke first. “Alex?”

“Speaking.” He couldn’t tell which one. Not Marcus – his voice was deepest.

“Alex…it’s Hunter.”

Alex got up and headed for the door, shaking his head when Maria gave him a questioning look. “Did you want something?”

“What, I can’t call to check on my little brother?”

Too defensive. Alex’s lip curled as he stepped outside. “What’re you checking on me for? I think I’m entitled to be surprised when it’s a first.” None of his brothers had called or messaged or even sent cards when he’d lost his foot. But that precedence had been set long before he enlisted – Manes men didn’t baby each other. They hadn’t when Marcus had gotten shot, they hadn’t when Hunter was MIA for almost a week, and they hadn’t when Alex lost half a limb. Flint was the only one of them who’d emerged completely unscathed from all the warzones he’d been in.

Hunter dropped the attempt at faking concern. “You heard from Dad lately?”

Alex snorted. “I haven’t heard from him in years, and I’m happy keeping it that way.”

A quiet grunt. “You’re a shade now, aren’t you, Alex?” 

“I am.”

“You feel anything spooky yesterday?”

“You’re gonna have to be a little more specific. I go out of my way looking for spooky.” He enjoyed the little sound of frustration that got him. Hunter had never been this easy to provoke when they were kids – their dad’s disappearance must have been getting to him. Or death; Alex supposed someone might have gone to check on Penvale by now and contacted Hunter or one of their other brothers as their dad’s registered family.

“I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like, but I felt haunted.”

“Is this a consultation?” Alex asked, arch. “Am I getting paid for this?”

“Oh, grow up,” Hunter snapped. “Did you feel haunted yesterday or not?”

“I told you, you’ll have to be more specific. I’m on a job right now, Hunter – I’m feeling haunted pretty much round the clock.”

“Yesterday morning.” Hunter’s voice was hard. “Around oh-eleven hundred hours.”

“Eleven am.” Alex paused, pretending to think. “I was actually in the house – it’s a haunted house I’m doing this week, so yeah, I was feeling pretty haunted. For the third time, you’ll have to be more specific. Did you see any apparitions? Feel like you were being observed? Experience any cold spots?”

“I…did you?”

“Yes,” Alex said, with exaggerated patience. “Because I was in a haunted location, so all of those things are completely normal.” He expected another sound of frustration, but Hunter was silent. “Hunter?”

“Flint’s dead.”

The bottom dropped out of Alex’s stomach for a second. “How?” he asked. “He was stationed in _Germany_, he’s not in the field.”

“Classified information.”

“Why am I hearing this from you?” Alex’s brain kept his mouth moving. “Did Dad fly out there already or something?”

“Dad’s dead too.”

Alex waited what he hoped was an appropriate amount of time to convey the proper amount of shock. “What happened?”

“Classified.”

“Seriously? _Seriously?_ Flint and Dad are both dead, and you get to know what happened and I don’t?”

“Don’t pretend you care,” Hunter said in a harsh tone. “You’ve never been one of us.”

“I wasn’t aware this family was a cult I had to sign up for membership to,” Alex snarled. “Is Marcus dead too, or is he in the know?”

“He’s alive.”

“Great. Great, okay, and what does this have to do with a haunt? Did something happen to you too?”

“You’re seriously telling me nothing happened to you?”

“I can’t compare unless you give me something more to go on, Hunter. Yesterday a ghost tried to get me to climb into a wall and gave me visions of vermin crawling out of the pipes. Is that the sort of stuff you’re talking about?”

“No. No, more like…Marcus saw things. I didn’t.”

Maybe because he was further away, Alex guessed. “Was Marcus with you?” Silence, and Alex scowled, letting real anger bleed through. “Were you doing something together, Manes men on tour without the black sheep tagging along, is that it? Was Flint on leave?”

“No.”

“What the hell is going on, Hunter? If it’s haunt-related, I’m a shade, I can help.”

“No.” Hunter sighed. “No, sorry, Alex. Maybe if you were still an airman, but you’re a civilian now. I just wanted to tell you about Flint and Dad.”

“Bullshit.” Alex couldn’t believe he was trying that. “You asked me if I’d heard from Dad lately, and you asked if I’d been haunted yesterday before you said anything about them dying. What’s really going on?”

“Goodbye, Alex.” 

Alex almost said something stupid, almost threw in a question about aliens or Project Shepherd, but held his tongue. Hunter hung up, and Alex leaned against the outside of the bar and ran his tongue along the line of his teeth, thinking.

Marcus was older, but Hunter was smarter. From Project Shepherd’s files, it looked like all three of his brothers had been heavily involved with all aspects of it, but his dad wouldn’t have been expecting to die. Marcus would have been the traditional choice for the next leader of the Project, but Hunter would do a better job.

Jesse Manes had had an older brother, once. Alex couldn’t even remember his name, just knew that he’d been killed in action. Another airman. It was entirely possible that his dad hadn’t been the first choice for taking over Project Shepherd. Maybe by having so many sons he’d been trying to give himself more options. Alex was a bust, of course, but he’d been a mistake, or so his brothers had liked to tell him. 

Flint was – had been – Army, but Marcus and Hunter had both followed their dad into the Air Force. But his dad wouldn’t have been grooming either of them to take over yet, not when he’d only been in his fifties with plenty of life left in him. Alex wasn’t actually sure how much independence his dad would have encouraged from them, but going by his memories of childhood, he would guess not much. Marcus and Hunter would not be prepared to take over Project Shepherd. A power struggle between them would only mess things up more.

They might surprise him and band together, of course, and he had to concede that he didn’t know them well enough to guess at whether they would try that. He was vaguely reminded of something a friend had told him once about male lions pairing up to improve their chances of taking over a pride. If Marcus and Hunter did that, they would be formidable. On the other hand, had they been as convicted as their father? Given the choice now between giving up an illegal operation and living their lives as they chose without their dad hanging over them, what would they do?

He texted Hunter on the number he’d called from.

**To: Unknown [15:19]**  
Any more information you’d like to share about our dead brother and father would be super, just saying.

He didn’t need to pretend he cared overmuch, he figured, not when Hunter had already tried to call him out on it.

The door opened and Maria came out with a full bag of trash. When she saw he wasn’t on the phone she paused and cocked her head. “Everything okay?”

“Flint’s dead.” 

“Oh my God.” Maria’s arm went slack, the plastic bag bouncing once against her leg. “Yesterday? Like that guard?”

“Classified.” Alex sneered and turned away. “That was Hunter who called me. He and Marcus are alive, and they know my dad’s dead, so that tip-off worked and someone ID’d my dad’s body. But yeah, I think Flint was too close to the nexus.” 

“Are you okay?”

Alex nodded before he could really consider it. “I need to find out how many others survived.”

“No rest for the wicked, huh?” Maria hefted her trash bag again. “I know how that goes.”

Alex sighed and pushed off from the wall. “You need any help?”

“Nah.” She touched his arm as she went past. “Go keep Mom company.”

He nodded and went back inside. Mimi was behind the bar, patting her hair and squinting at her reflection in the mirror. “You know it’s like I’ve missed about nine years?” she said conversationally as Alex approached. “I remember it like a smashed mirror. All these different pieces throwing off all these different reflections. God only knows how people are going to react to me being back.”

“Do you have a story for that?” Alex asked, suddenly concerned.

Mimi shook her head and turned around to smile sadly at him. “Maria didn’t tell anyone what was happening. And you know what people are like.”

“Not really.” Alex came to sit opposite her. Mimi sighed.

“You break your arm, you get sympathy cards and people offering to carry things for you. You get chronic migraines, people will tell you about their headaches and then forget about it, and get annoyed if you bring it up. Lost a leg?” She raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s either over-the-top offers of help or ignoring it completely, right?”

“More or less.”

“Sickness and injury show you who your real friends are,” Mimi said seriously. “The ones who keep showing up and _remember_ that even if it isn’t as obvious as an arm in a sling, you’re not at your best. People don’t do that for their bartender.”

“Some people will know you were in Sunset Mesa though, won’t they?”

“Oh sure.” She snorted and snapped her hand through the air dismissively. “I was sick, now I’m better. Look at me! I’m completely better.” She put her hands on her hips and grinned. “And if I’m mad as hell about basically losing the better part of a decade, well, there’s really nothing I can do about it, is there?”

Alex hesitated, suddenly apprehensive. “You know it isn’t anything to do with Max and Isobel, right? Or Michael?”

“They might not have meant it, but –”

“No.” Alex straightened, making sure to hold Mimi’s gaze. “It wasn’t them at all, Mimi.”

Mimi shook her head. “I know you think you know them, sweetheart, but do you, really? Before she died…” She shook her head again. “Rosa told me Isobel Evans told her something, a secret that scared her. It must have been this. And Alex, the way she talked about Isobel Evans, like she was _hunting_ her, it wasn’t good. I know Maria’s never liked her either, she says she’s fake, right down to the core.”

“They all are,” Alex said sharply. “They’ve had to be. They’ve been in hiding all their lives, remember? And that wasn’t Isobel, back then. She was being possessed.”

Mimi jerked, frowning in surprise. “Possessed? Can they be possessed?”

“They can by other aliens.” Alex weighed up the options quickly – it wasn’t his story to tell, but Mimi could very well be a threat to the continued presence of Max, Isobel, and Michael in Roswell, and if he left telling the story up to one of them, they might edit it to protect themselves, which would only make Mimi more suspicious of them. So Alex leaned forward and told it himself, just the facts, as emotionless as he could manage. Near the end, he heard Maria come back in, and she stayed quiet as she took the chairs off the tables. Alex kept an eye on her in the mirror, glad that she didn’t interrupt.

He could still see it hit Mimi, the instinctive empathy for someone having their agency completely overridden. It was chased by that now-familiar wariness though. “How do you know she isn’t lying?” she asked. “You never spoke to her husband, did you? They killed him before you had the chance.”

“They did, and I’ve thought about that.” Alex laced his fingers together on the bar. “It comes down to trust and belief, at the end of the day. I don’t trust Isobel, you’re right, but I believe her. She might be a phenomenal actor, but Michael’s version of events matches hers, and they didn’t have time to straighten out a story for my benefit. And Michael believes her, and trusts her, and I trust Michael.

“Also,” he added, “I would trust anyone more than my dad, including a someone who’s an alien and basically a stranger to me. I would treat everything my dad or Jim Valenti ever told you about aliens as suspect. My father was a bigoted, paranoid monster who obviously had no qualms with torturing people to death because he thought they _might_ be a threat, and he had no problem with illegally running a military operation out of his own pocket because it suited his personal agenda and played into his egotistical idea of a Manes legacy.” One of his knuckles cracked, and he realised he’d been holding his hands together so tightly they were beginning to hurt.

Maria came up behind him and touched his shoulder. “I believe her too, Mom.”

“You don’t have to like your undocumented neighbours,” Alex said quietly. “Just don’t turn them in. They’re not hurting anyone. They just want to live in peace like everyone else.”

Mimi looked between them, a small wrinkled between her eyebrows. “You trust Michael Guerin?” Her gaze settled on Alex, and he nodded.

“As much as Maria.”

“Which is really saying something, when you think about how long we’ve known each other,” Maria smirked, breaking the sombre mood. She turned around when the door opened and a tall blonde man Alex recognised from his first night in town swaggered in. “Hank!” Maria pulled on her bartender’s smile. “Early bird gets the worm. What can I getcha?”

Alex had no interest in being within ten feet of this kind of guy, and he nodded to Mimi as he got up. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Not staying round again?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Nah.” He swung his bag over his shoulder. “I’ve got all my stuff. My motel room’s paid till tomorrow and I could use some breathing space.”

She narrowed her eyes, lips pursed and smiling a little at one corner. He recognised the expression, but it took him a second to remember it was her psychic face. She and Maria both narrowed their eyes the same way, and he shook his head, smiling before he could stop himself. “Come on, Mimi, don’t give me that face.”

“Can’t control it, can I?” she shrugged and reached out to snag his hand before he could move too far away. Along the bar, Maria was doing the same for Hank, and Alex could hear her spinning him some bullshit about that Wednesday being unlucky for him, so watch out for bad omens. “You’ve got a face of your own, you know.”

“Oh yeah?” he smiled, crooked. “Does it say as much as my palm?”

She snorted and folded his hand closed, held gently in both of hers. “I don’t need to look at your palm to know you have a choice to make, hon.”

“That’s all life is, right? One choice after another.” He shrugged. “One more beer or an early night. High road or low road.”

“Stay or go,” Mimi said, canny and far too knowing. She patted his closed hand. “Better make that choice, Alex, or something else will make it for you. Come and find us tomorrow.”

“I will.” Alex let her squeeze his hand once more, and couldn’t quite return her smile before he turned to leave. He passed two more men on his way out, and heard Mimi shout a greeting to one of them.

He hesitated, outside. Coming out of a bar like the Pony was like coming out of a cinema or a warehouse – the sunlight was always a surprise. Impulsively, he started walking. Past the already-glowing neon sign and out onto the main road, walking to a crossing point so he could walk further into town and away from the heavier traffic.

He didn’t know exactly where he was headed until he hit Washington Avenue and started walking south, and he didn’t really admit it to himself until he was crossing the highway and heading even further south. Several blocks over his dad’s house was sitting empty. A few blocks below that was a swing set in Stiles Park with his name on it.

The walk took him about an hour, and then when he was finally approaching the park he realised that it was still light and he was about to look like an absolute creep, hanging around a kid’s park by himself, so he turned around and headed for the motel instead. His leg ached, but not as badly as he’d expected. His room was as bland and unthreatening as it had been terrifying before he’d gone to stay with Michael, and he found that what he’d told Mimi was true: he did need the breathing space.

He took a quick shower, then a long bath, letting the heat soak into his leg and ease the pretty much constant ache up his back where he overcompensated for his prosthesis sometimes without noticing. He set a podcast going on his phone and just let himself drift for a bit, luxuriating in the solitude.

When he got out he ordered food instead of going out again, wanting to hold onto his quiet bubble for a while longer. It had taken him many years to learn how to draw a line between time on the job and time off. Years of fellow airmen ribbing him about working too hard, of friends putting their feet down and forcing him to come out with them. The long weeks of recovery after losing his foot had been useful, in that respect. Having nothing else to do and nothing to distract him from his injury, he’d been forced to try other avenues of distraction. 

He’d started actually watching the shows people had been recommending he watch for years. He’d read a few books. He’d tried whittling, just for something to do with his hands, and when that didn’t work, he tried doodling like he had back in school. It took him trying his hand at origami for him to realise that he actually just liked to sit still sometimes and watch or listen to things. And there was still a part of himself that always chided the lack of useful activity. Quiet or loud depending on how bad his mood was, but always there.

Baths were good because he couldn’t do anything with his hands if they were wet. Reading was good because holding a book and turning pages kept his hands full without really occupying them.

What did Michael do with his hands when he watched TV? Did he read any books that weren’t huge academic tomes on things like astrophysics? Alex imagined he was the sort of person who liked having his hands busy at all times. He certainly fidgeted enough for that to be the case, but Alex didn’t know for sure. He wanted to know for sure.

He’d been good about not thinking about Michael pretty much all day, even when they’d been in the same room. All the things Alex had pushed down were swirling up again, and he lay in the bath with his eyes closed and sighed when the podcast ended and the only sound in the room became his breathing, and the occasional ripple of water when he moved. 

Killing in a combat situation wasn't murder, but that wasn't the situation he’d been in when he’d shot his father at Penvale. Was that murder? His memories of the event seemed sharp, but he didn’t trust his own mind, even now Roswell had gone back to normal. Memories were constructed and inherently false. He was sure he’d turned the gun to point at his father’s chest. He was sure of it. But he’d been sure of a lot of things in his life, and who knew what the truth really was?

No. He closed his eyes and sank down in the bath until the water covered his ears, tipping his head back and lifting his hands to slick his hair down under the water. He wasn't going to use his faulty brain as an excuse. He’d killed his father. Whether or not that counted as murder didn’t matter, and if it did, so be it. He wasn’t ever going to go to court for it, or at least the possibility was very slim. His father and Williams had been found in a location that ought to have been empty, and was instead outfitted for regular use. That alone would ensure his case would be sucked into the military and clamped down on – if Alex ever heard the results from that, he’d be surprised. The important thing, he decided, was how he felt about it. And even with two days between then and now, he still felt good. Not good, he mentally corrected. It hadn’t thrilled him to do it, but it had felt necessary. 

It was a relief, that was what he kept coming back to. A huge weight had been lifted. It was like he’d been shadowed his whole life in a way he hadn’t fully perceived, and he’d only noticed it now it was gone.

He sat up and tilted his head to let the water trickle out of one ear, then the other, then opened his eyes and looked at his wrist. His dad had left a couple of bruises there. Very faint – Alex had never bruised easily – but there, like little blue smudges on his skin. They were only really visible at this stage, and when they went green. After that his skin tone was just dark enough to conceal them.

They were the last bruises his dad would ever give him.

Since he was alone, Alex didn't bother to stop himself from grinning, examining the bruises from every angle. He almost wanted to take a photo to memorialise them. His father would never touch him again. And so what if he didn’t feel guilty about killing him? He’d been a terrible father, and an evil man. Alex had read the reports, he’d seen the evidence. His father had kept innocent people locked up for decades and overseen their torture and eventual murder. His morality could never be questioned again. 

It didn’t matter if Alex saw Hunter and Marcus and they gave him the old line about how their dad had only been trying to toughen them up and prepare them for the world, that he'd been harsh, but fair. Alex didn’t have to second-guess himself or worry about his memories or the truth of the situation in their home when he’d been a kid. His father had been a monster. It was an incontrovertible fact, and Alex had the proof in black and white. It was different to the proof of Michael’s wrecked hand – that had been another secret, another act his dad had gotten away with. The Project Shepherd files detailed everything clearly, with no way to misinterpret or rationalise what his dad had done.

It was almost better than knowing he was dead. 

Alex wrapped his hand around his bruised wrist and pressed down, the ache a familiar pain. His dad could never hurt him again. He would never hurt anyone again.

He would never be able to hurt Michael again.

Or his family, but for Alex, Michael was the one who mattered most.

He stayed in and even took a nap, crashing out without meaning to and jerking awake from a dream that hadn’t quite been scary enough to qualify as a nightmare, but that certainly hadn’t been pleasant either. His phone had no new messages when he checked, and he felt betrayed by his own disappointment, realising only in its absence that he’d hoped for another message from Michael.

He hadn’t sensed a single haunt since getting back to Roswell yesterday. He knew that if he went back to Stiles Park, he wouldn’t find anything. He got dressed in the only clean shirt he had left and ran his hands through his hair. He fiddled with his prosthesis. He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and wondered whether anyone looking at him could tell he was related to Jesse Manes.

Make a choice or have it made for him. 

He’d had his decision-making abilities trained as an airman. His patience was an asset until it tipped too far and became inaction. When he tried to rectify it, he tended to overcorrect to the point of impulsivity. It had taken him forever to understand that there was never a perfect time worth waiting for that he would just _know_ when it came. He had to make the opportunity himself. He had to judge the situation and choose the action he took.

He stared at his face in the mirror and watched the line of his mouth tighten, the lines between his eyebrows grow deeper, the one that followed the scar across his forehead creasing deepest.

He loved Michael. He was _in_ love with Michael. And before, the shadow of his father had loomed over them, a constant threat keeping them apart, and now Alex was free of it. He could start again. If Michael really did want him, Alex had to know. And he wanted Michael to know the truth too. He wanted to be brave, for once.

Walking to the junkyard would have taken too long, so he took an uber. The driver was the same guy who’d picked him up from outside the Wild Pony his first night back in Roswell, but if he recognised him, he didn’t mention it. Alex watched the sunset-orange sky out of the window and gave the guy a five-star rating for his silence.

He got out of the uber outside the junkyard and walked in slowly. Michael’s Airstream was dark, but his truck was there. Alex assumed he was in the bunker, and was just getting his phone out to message him when he realised the pickup’s tailgate was down, and as he walked over, he saw Michael’s feet at the end of it. “Guerin?”

“Alex?” Michael propped himself up on an elbow, saw him, and lay back down. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Alex looked between the pickup and the trailer, hesitating. He stepped closer and looked in, taking in the sight of Michael lying down on a blanket, hat nowhere in sight, staring up at the sky. Alex licked his lips nervously, then made a decision and climbed up into the truck bed to lie down next to him. 

Michael turned his head to look at him, and Alex could practically feel his surprise, but he looked up instead, courage faltering now they were shoulder to shoulder. “What’re you doing?” he asked, carefully casual, as if his stomach wasn’t quailing at the potential of being rejected. “Stargazing?” He would live, if that happened. It would hurt, it would be agony, but he had to know for sure. He couldn’t start a new life without doing this.

Michael looked up again and answered after a moment’s silence. “Yeah.”

Dusk hadn’t fallen that long ago, and the sky was still only a dark blue, not the inky black that would reveal the stars in all their glory. But there were still pinpricks of light up there, when Alex looked. “Do you know the constellations?”

He wasn’t sure for a moment whether Michael would reply, but he did, even if it sounded a bit defeated for some reason. “Yeah, all of ‘em. Do you?”

Alex shook his head, looking around to try and find stars he recognised. “I know Orion’s Belt, and the Big Dipper, and Pisces, but that’s it.” 

“You’re not a Pisces,” Michael said, a frown in his voice, and Alex gazed up at the darkness.

“No, but Rosa was.”

The silence that followed that was pregnant with unspoken things. Michael, as usual, was the one to break it. “How’re you gonna find Liz?”

“Through Arturo.” Alex didn’t know whether he was glad or not that the truck bed was wide enough that he and Michael could both lie down in it with enough space that they didn’t have to properly touch. He was stalling, and he knew it. Could Michael tell? “He’ll be able to put us in contact.”

“And then, what? You’ll go and find her?”

“Yeah.”

“What if she’s really far away? In another country or something?”

“I guess I’ll have to call her first.”

“You think she’ll believe you? Really? About all this?”

Alex sighed. “I think…she’ll know that Maria and I would never joke about Rosa’s death. She’ll want to know for sure. Liz always wanted to know everything for sure. She didn’t believe in zodiac signs or magic or spirits or anything like that.”

“Aliens included?” Michael muttered.

“Yeah. I remember her arguing with Maria and Rosa about the existence of God.” Alex smiled slightly at the memory. “She approaches everything so logically. Logically, she knows aliens don’t exist. But equally logically, she knows Maria and I would never lie to her about Rosa’s death. She’ll come back. She’s always wanted to know the truth of things.”

“What’re you doing here, Alex?”

Alex swallowed, and focused his gaze on one star in particular, so faint he almost wasn’t sure whether he was seeing it at all. Michael had gotten tired of letting him avoid the issue, it seemed. Fear was locking his body up tight, and he had to force the words out. “Trying to find a better answer for you.”

“Answer for what?”

“That question, basically.”

Michael was quiet. Alex could swear the air was buzzing, the never-quite-silent silence of the outdoors filling the space between them. “You said you couldn’t explain, when I asked you before.”

“Yeah.” Alex swallowed again. “I’ve been thinking about it. Trying to figure out…trying to figure it out.”

“And?”

Alex laughed a little, a quiet puff of sound that didn’t even come close to conveying how on edge he was. “I’m still trying. It’s…it’s not logical. None of it makes sense, y’know?” Michael was quiet, and Alex clenched his fists and forced himself to keep speaking, to keep putting one word in front of the other, however haltingly. “I wouldn’t’ve offered the tool shed to just anyone. I wouldn’t have come back to Roswell, a town I swore I’d never set foot in again, for just anyone. But I still…I still don’t really understand why. Especially…it’s been thirteen years, and there’s no one else I’d do that for. No one. It’s just you. It’s always been you.” He swallowed around an unexpected lump in his throat. 

“And last week, you turned up out of nowhere and I just…I dropped everything and followed you back here and now…you make me feel like that when I’m with you and when you, you touch me or even just look at me, it’s like I’m seventeen again, like the last thirteen years never happened and I never went to war and I never became what I am, and I don’t want…” He could hear Michael shift next to him and he sped up, afraid that if he stopped he might never open his mouth again. 

“I don’t want it to stop, but it has to, right? I need to deal with what my family’s done to yours and my part in that, and you…I know you’d do anything for your family, including me, but you’re going to stop, you’ll look away and it’s gonna kill me. Even if I understand it, you know, it’s just…I get it.” He paused to breathe, to gulp down a mouthful of air, and suddenly Michael’s hand was curled in the fabric of his shirt, right over his heart. He hadn’t known he was going to be so pessimistic until he was saying it, voicing all his deeply pushed down fears, along with the gut-deep conviction that Michael could never want him back, not the man who’d led him into the trap that injured him so badly when they were boys.

Alex braced himself and turned his head to look at him. Michael’s expression was half shadowed in the falling night, but Alex could see the way his eyes were shining. “I never looked away,” he said, quiet and painfully earnest. Alex’s heart thumped hard against his ribs. “Thirteen years, I never stopped either, Alex. But you said, when you left, you told me not to try and contact you, and you told me it was over and you were never coming back.”

Alex couldn’t get that proper lungful of air. His chest felt tight, Michael’s warm hand on it the only thing tethering him. He reached up and curled his own hand over the top of it, trying not to hold on too tight in case it hurt Michael’s bad fingers. He would have understood if Michael had agreed that it had been a lie to get Alex on his side – he didn’t understand this, but he wasn’t going to fight it, not when he wanted it so badly. He didn’t have to understand it to accept it. “If I run away again, I want you to chase me,” he whispered. He couldn’t speak louder; couldn’t get enough air to. “I want you to find me like you did in Las Cruces, no matter where I go.”

“I don’t wanna chase you.” Michael’s fingernails dug into Alex’s chest where he tightened his grip in his shirt, and he went on before Alex’s heart could give more than one panicky lurch. “I want you to stay. If – Alex, if I asked you to stay, would you?”

Every cell in Alex’s body seemed to be straining towards Michael. “Ask me,” he said.

Michael’s quick inhale was shaky. “Will you stay?”

“Yes.” Alex leaned forward and Michael met him in the middle, pressing their foreheads together for a second before tipping his chin up to kiss him, long and sweet, his hand leaving Alex’s chest to fit to the shape of his jaw instead. “With you,” Alex breathed in a gap between kisses. “I’ll stay with you.”

The sound Michael made at that was soft and a little bit broken, and Alex rolled onto his side to press closer, cradling Michael’s face and kissing him over and over. He always wanted to be kissing Michael. He always wanted to be touching him.

“You mean it?” Michael breathed against his lips, hand trembling against Alex’s jaw. “You’ll really stay?” Another long, soft kiss. “Even after…after all this?”

“My dad’s dead.” Alex kissed him, slid his hand back into Michael’s hair and kissed him again. “I’m going to destroy Project Shepherd for good.” Michael kissed him harder, and Alex moaned softly. “I can…I want to stay, if it’s with you. It doesn’t matter if it’s Roswell, if you’re here.”

Michael’s mouth bumped against the corner of Alex’s, his breathing shaky. “Even though we’re dangerous? And we might have to go on the run?”

“I’ll run with you.” Alex slotted their mouths together again, Michael’s tongue warm against his. “I’ll keep you safe,” he breathed.

Michael made a shivery sort of noise, and Alex stroked the back of his head, careful not to get his fingers tangled in Michael’s hair. “You…” Michael pulled back and swallowed. “How’re you gonna…are you still gonna be a shade?”

“Yeah.” Alex wanted to kiss him again, but held back for a moment. “Most shades have a home base, you know. I can make mine here. And it was never going to be forever anyway.”

“They’ll let you?”

“I’ll call them tomorrow.” Alex leaned in and kissed him, feeling it when Michael smiled. “Can I stay again?” he mumbled. “If you don’t want –”

“Stay.” Michael’s next kiss was searing, enough to make Alex’s stomach turn somersaults. “I want you to stay.”

“Then I’ll stay.” Alex knew more practicalities than just his job would have to be dealt with. There was the issue of Marcus, Hunter, and Project Shepherd, and the longer-term issue of living situations, and a whole host of other things they were going to have to deal with. And that was just assuming that nothing would go horribly wrong and they would be able to continue living normal lives in Roswell like Michael and his family weren’t secretly aliens. 

He and Michael weren’t exactly poster children for great mental health either, and Alex knew that they were going to have to face those problems at some point. They were going to rub each other the wrong way and argue and get pissed at each other for not talking or saying the wrong things or doing things that made no sense to each other.

But they would handle it. As long as neither of them ran away again, they could figure it out.

“Stop thinking,” Michael muttered, thumb pressed to the corner of Alex’s mouth. He turned his head to bite it gently, and smiled when Michael licked his lips.

“I’ll put it on hold for tomorrow, shall I?”

“Yeah.” Michael pressed their foreheads together, eyes falling closed. “Tomorrow. Will you…do you wanna go inside?”

Alex kissed him again and hummed agreement, then leaned back with a sudden dread. “Max won’t be able to feel it, will he? Through the handprint?”

Michael laughed. “Nah.”

“Good.”

They slid out of the truck bed together, uncoordinated and clumsy. Michael didn’t let go of him, and reeled him in as soon as they were upright. Alex realised that he didn’t care that they were kissing in the open, and grinned against Michael’s lips. “What?” he mumbled.

“I love you.” It was out before Alex could stop it, and it was such a relief when Michael’s arms went tight around him, one of his hands sliding up to rest on the back of Alex’s neck. He looked amazed, and he was smiling, his face all blue shadows.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Guerin. Michael.” That was the answer. That was why he’d come back to Roswell and why he’d poured everything into helping him. It was why he’d offered Michael the tool shed when they were younger, even if he hadn’t known what that feeling was at the time, or what it had the potential to become. It settled into him and through him, soothing and brilliant at the same time. “I love you.”

Michael’s thumb stroked the side of his neck, just brushing his hairline. “You know I love you.” His voice was so low, gravelly and utterly serious, even though he was still smiling a little.

Alex realised that he did, and nodded. When he leaned in for another kiss, Michael’s hand tightened on the back of his neck, warm and heavy and welcome.

They made it to the Airstream in increments, barely separating for long enough to walk. Michael turned on the lights as soon as they were in, letting go of Alex with one arm to pull the door shut. “I wanna see you,” he said, as if Alex had protested. Alex, emboldened, leaned back to shrug off his jacket, and Michael grinned and reached out to help as he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt so he could pull it over his head and toss it aside.

Michael had never hesitated to touch him before, and he didn’t now. If Max’s glowing handprint on Alex’s chest was a problem, he didn’t show it. He spread his hands across Alex’s bare skin and ducked to kiss his collarbone, his sternum, thumbs rubbing over Alex’s nipples until his breath was shivering out of him and he was arching his back into it. “Michael.”

Michael groaned and slid one hand around to the small of Alex’s back to push his spine out further, encouraging him. Alex put a hand in his hair, and Michael went to his knees, pressing his whole face to Alex’s stomach for a second before he opened his mouth and kissed him there, and started to suck. Alex’s mouth fell open, his grip in Michael’s hair going tight. “_Michael._”

“Mmmm.” Michael nosed at the wet spot he’d left and his hands dropped to Alex’s belt, tugging it open. “Can I…”

“Yeah.” Alex swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn’t asked before, but he needed to ask now. “Do you have any lube?”

Michael’s head snapped up, and his eyes were so dark and his lips were so red that Alex’s brain went offline for a full second. “Yeah,” he rasped, and Alex knew he had to say it fast or he’d lose his nerve, so he just went for it, looking down at Michael and feeling goosebumps break out down his arms.

“I want you to fuck me.”

Michael’s mouth opened on a loud exhale that Alex felt against his stomach, a hot rush of air. “Anything,” he breathed, and Alex heard the click of his throat as he swallowed. “Anything you want.”

The offer sent heat twisting through Alex’s whole body, and he scrunched the handful of curls he had gently, watching the way Michael’s eyelids fluttered when he did. “Do you still wanna…” he trailed off, but Michael knew what he meant, and he nodded as he went back to pulling Alex’s belt free and unbuttoning his fly. 

“So much.”

Alex was so, so glad he’d had a shower and a bath before coming over.

“Don’t make me come,” he managed to say, and Michael made a quiet sound of acknowledgement before he eased Alex’s dick free and slid his mouth down around it. Alex groaned, too loud and desperate, but it felt so good. Michael curled his good hand around the base and wrapped his other arm around the backs of Alex’s thighs, pulling him forward until he was sitting on the edge of the table. He had to hold onto it, his other hand flexing in Michael’s hair, and he sucked in shaking breaths as Michael rubbed his tongue against the underside of his cock, starting a slow, spit-slick glide up and down. “Fuck, Michael – _oh_ –” He felt it when Michael moaned, and it took everything in him not to let his eyes fall closed. He wanted to see. He wanted to see everything.

He had to stop Michael far too soon. “You’re too good at that,” he muttered, tugging gently at Michael’s hair and smiling when Michael grinned, smug and happy.

“Flattery’ll get you everywhere.”

“Will it get me into bed?” Alex arched an eyebrow, and Michael laughed, giving him a once-over that miraculously didn’t make Alex feel at all self-conscious, for all that he was standing shirtless in Michael’s kitchen with his dick out.

Michael stripped while Alex removed his prosthesis, and got a small bottle of lube and a box of condoms from a drawer under his bed. “I’ve never done this before,” Michael admitted, a little hoarse.

Alex blinked, shifting up onto his knees and sitting back on his heel. “Like…with a guy?”

Michael nodded, and Alex shifted forward so their knees were touching, reaching out to hold onto Michael’s arm because he couldn’t _not_ be touching him right now. “Done other stuff, but not…” He trailed off as Alex leaned back and pulled Michael down next to him, unfolding their legs so they tangled together. The tension in Michael’s shoulders vanished when they kissed, and Alex finished it with a bite to his lower lip.

“We can go slow,” he said, and Michael swept his hand down Alex’s spine, firm and sure.

“Okay.”

They’d ended up in the perfect position almost by accident, with Alex on his right side and Michael on his left, so Alex could crook his good leg up and Michael could slick up the fingers of his good hand. Alex fingered himself first, reminding his body how it went, how to relax. When Michael’s fingers stroked at his entrance, stretched around Alex’s fingers, Alex moaned, other hand going tight on Michael’s shoulder. It was easy to slide his fingers out and let Michael replace them, and easy to let Michael kiss him.

Michael had definitely done this bit before. Alex would have put money on it. He gasped into Michael’s arm, eyes squeezed shut and limbs shaking, and finally had to shove Michael onto his back so he wouldn’t go off before they got to the next step.

“Fuck,” he breathed, chest heaving. “Jesus _fuck._”

Michael was sweating, and he trailed warm, wet fingers down the inside of Alex’s thigh. “Anything you want.”

Alex dragged him into another kiss for that. 

They had to turn around and put their heads at the other end of the bed, closer to the kitchen than the bathroom. Alex wanted the wall on his bad side so he could brace himself against it if he needed to, and he knew he would need to if he rode Michael, which was what he wanted to do. Michael lay on his back and gazed up at Alex with a stunned, half-there smile and held onto Alex’s hips as he knelt above him.

“You don’t mind…” Alex gestured one last time to his chest, to Max’s handprint, and his last hesitation eased when Michael shook his head.

“You’re alive,” he said, still hoarse, and Alex smiled, breathless and understanding. He reached back with one hand and held Michael in place, rubbing him against his entrance for a second just for the way it made Michael’s mouth open, his tongue darting out to wet his lips.

Alex sank down a couple of inches slowly, then knelt up again before pushing down further. Michael was already panting, and Alex didn’t feel any more put together. Fingers were one thing, but they never went as deep as this. Michael stretched him open, and Alex curled his hand into a fist against the wall as he eased himself down until he couldn’t go any further. 

“You,” Michael gasped. “Alex, please.”

Alex could feel Michael trembling, felt the fingernails of his good hand digging into his ass, and all of it – those sensations, the stretched-full feeling of Michael inside him, the way Michael sounded – all of it was so much. He couldn’t speak, he could only pull himself up again and rock back down, hard cock leaking onto Michael’s belly as Michael whimpered underneath him.

Alex had to pull off twice so they could add more lube, and it was hard to find a good rhythm at first – the last time he’d done this, he’d had two legs – but when Michael clutched him tight and sat up so they could hold onto each other properly, it was so good Alex never wanted it to end. He pressed his mouth to Michael’s hair and let Michael hold him up as he brought himself down, grinding in the perfect spot to send sparks up his spine. 

He’d forgotten how good this could feel, how good it felt to be fucked. He wondered if there would always be a part of him that was so deeply satisfied by doing this, by enjoying so thoroughly an act that he’d so often been told was shameful and disgusting. It was beautiful, like this. With Michael, gasping open-mouthed against Alex’s shoulder and holding onto him so carefully, so firmly, it was right.

Michael kissed his neck, sliding his hand under Alex’s right thigh to help when he couldn’t get enough leverage from his residual limb. Alex loved his strength. He loved Michael’s stubble against his skin, his shoulders bunching under Alex’s arms, his gutted sounds whenever Alex clenched around him. “Alex,” he groaned. “Alex, I can’t…”

“Yeah.” Alex’s cock was rubbing against Michael’s belly with every move he made, but it wasn’t quite enough. He was so close, he could feel it, but he wanted Michael to come first. “I want you to, come on.” He sounded wrecked, he realised dizzily. He sounded as hoarse as Michael, breathless and stupid as he urged Michael on.

Michael made a desperate sound and pressed his forehead into Alex’s shoulder as his hips started to jerk harder. He came on a high, sobbing sound, and Alex reached down as soon as he felt stable enough to wrap his hand around his cock, bringing himself off in just a few hard strokes, muffling his own gasp in Michael’s hair. 

Michael held him where he was as both of them came down from it, breathing heavily in the sudden quiet. “Can we do that again?” Michael asked after a moment, voice cracking halfway through. He looked up at Alex and swallowed, eyes lidded. “Like, not now, but.”

Alex grinned, sex-drunk and giddy. “Yeah. I want to fuck you too.” He felt Michael’s still-hard cock twitch inside him, and Michael nodded quickly.

“Yeah. Yes. God.”

Alex sat back a little so he could lean down and kiss him, soft and slow. “Anything you want. Everything.”

Michael exhaled shakily against his lips, and Alex’s stomach flipped over. They cleaned up in a sort of haze, Michael holding onto the base of the condom while Alex knelt up and just sort of collapsed sideways with a laugh. At some point, he decided, he would tell Michael that sex had never felt so good with anyone else. Not now, but at some point. They had time.

Alex changed the sheets while Michael went outside to get Alex’s bag and his crutches, which he’d left out by Michael’s truck and completely forgotten about. They couldn’t stop grinning at each other, and when they got into the narrow bed and turned out the lights, Michael cupped Alex’s cheek and just looked at him, smiling in the dark. “You’re still staying?”

“Still staying.” Alex kissed the heel of his palm, not looking away. “As long as you’ll have me.”

“I’m gonna need a bigger trailer.”

Alex laughed softly. “Not tempted by an apartment?”

“Couldn’t ever get a good one – I’ve got a shit credit rating.”

“Good thing mine’s decent then.”

“You asking me to move in with you, shade?” Michael’s smile grew, and Alex rubbed the knuckles of his right hand against Michael’s chest. 

“If I did, would you say yes?”

Michael grinned. “Ask me.”

Alex’s heart swelled. There were so many things they needed to take care of first, not least making sure that even staying in Roswell was safe, but hadn’t he just said yesterday he’d take Michael to Disneyland? Why couldn’t they do all the things they wanted? “Will you move in with me?”

“Yes.” Michael kissed him, tasting of mint from his toothpaste, and Alex hummed as he kissed him back. “Hey,” Michael murmured against his lips. “Will you get breakfast with me?”

“Tomorrow,” Alex promised, and felt Michael smile. 

“First date?”

Alex laughed. “Sounds perfect.”

Michael kissed him again, and then fell back onto the pillow with his eyes closed, still smiling. Alex tucked his face against Michael’s shoulder and closed his eyes too. Tomorrow, he thought nonsensically, and grinned. All the tomorrows in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL HASN'T THIS BEEN A RIDE. Because this started as a short oneshot (please laugh hysterically both with and at me), in my head I still sort of think of it as a short oneshot, but this is now my longest fic to date??? Unbelievable. In a perfect illustration of how my editing process works, this last chapter was originally the shortest at only 6k or so. Then I read it through again today and thought, you know what this needs? An extra 3.5k of smut. You're welcome.
> 
> Your comments have been incredible and I'm going to actually reply to them on this chapter, because now that this is over I have time to relax! I've also added a list of music inspo in the notes of chapter one, because I forgot to do that when I started posting, so if that's something you're interested in, that's where you'll find it! I LOVE YOU ALL.


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